




,4°, 



«5> ^ 



' <V 









'*«** 




v 






*•-'* A° ">. 



.<V *» •' ^ *> 



"bv* 



n>v» 



> ^ 






















» ^ 







V 











v7^ % A o- 







*< ^q* .V 5 



^ *•»«' <^> 



4 o 



#++. 




Harris & Ewing 



WOODROW WILSON 



WAR ADDRESSES OF 
WOODROW WILSON 



WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES 

BY 

ARTHUR ROY LEONARD, M.A. 

HEAD OF DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY AND ECONOMICS 
HIGH SCHOOL OF COMMERCE, COLUMBUS, OHIO 



GINN AND COMPANY 

BOSTON • NEW YORK • CHICAGO • LONDON 
ATLANTA • DALLAS • COLUMBUS • SAN FRANCISCO 



(L*Aj* % 



COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY ARTHUR ROY LEONARD ' 



ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 
218.4 



.IW5 



^h 



RPR 29 ISIS 



tCfte gtftettaeum £regg 

GINN AND COMPANY • PRO- 
PRIETORS • BOSTON • U.S.A. 



©CU494787-/ 



PREFACE 

There are three reasons why the study of President 
Wilson's war addresses may wisely be included in 
the course of study of every secondary school in 
America. The first is their intrinsic literary merit. 
President Wilson has a happy faculty for expressing 
his thoughts in remarkably clear and forceful English. 
His feelings, however provocative the occasion, never 
obscure his thought. His terse, clear-cut, cool-headed 
manner of stating facts is worthy of careful study by 
America's young people, whose thinking, as a rule, is 
not characterized by these qualities. 

A second reason for the study of President Wilson's 
addresses is their timeliness. Fortunately the day is 
passed when America's teachers were afraid to intro- 
duce the writings of living Americans into the curric- 
ulum as literature. Because young people will be more 
interested in the addresses of President Wilson than 
in Burke's " Speech on Conciliation," for example, is 
certainly not a reason for refusing to study them. 

The third reason may best be indicated by a quota- 
tion from the President's letter of August 23, 19 17, 
to school officers : 

The war is bringing to the minds of our people a new 
appreciation of the problems of national life, and a deeper 
understanding of the meaning and aims of democracy. 
Matters which heretofore have seemed commonplace and 

iii 



PREFACE 

trivial are seen in a truer light. The urgent demand for the 
production and proper distribution of food and other national 
resources has made us aware of the close dependence of 
individual on individual and nation on nation. The effort 
to keep up social and industrial organizations in spite of the 
withdrawal of men for the army has revealed the extent to 
which modern life has become complex and specialized. 

These and other lessons of the war must be learned 
quickly if we are intelligently and successfully to defend our 
institutions. When the war is over, we must apply the wis- 
dom which we have acquired in purging and ennobling the 
life of the world. 

In these vital tasks of acquiring a broader view of human 
possibilities the common school must have a large part. I 
urge that teachers and other school officers increase mate- 
rially the time and attention devoted to instruction bearing 
directly on the problems of community and national life. 

Such a plea is no way foreign to the spirit of American 
public education or of existing practices. Nor is it a plea 
for a temporary enlargement of the school program appro- 
priate merely to the period of the war. It is a plea for a 
realization in public education of the new emphasis which 
the war has given to the ideals of democracy and to the 
broader conceptions of national life. 

It is the belief of the editor that a study of the 
President's discussion of the aim and purpose of the 
war will do more than any other equal amount of 
study to bring to our young people a realization 
of the real meaning of the democracy for which we 
are trying to make the world safe. Clear, cogent 
thinking is vastly more important as an element of 
patriotism than flag-waving and cheering, though these 
latter have their place, 
iv 



PREFACE 

The work of editing these addresses has been a 
real pleasure. The length of the Introduction is due 
to an effort to make the setting of the addresses 
clear to young people who perhaps were not in high 
school when the war began. The notes are brief, 
because it has seemed better to let the President 
speak for himself. The aim of the teacher should be 
to help the pupil to grasp the real thought of the 
addresses, to appreciate their clear-cut conciseness, 
and to arouse a thoughtful, earnest love for the land 
that fights for no selfish ends. 

It may be added that President Wilson has ex- 
pressly authorized the editor to use these addresses 

in this manner. 

ARTHUR R. LEONARD 
Columbus, Ohio 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Introduction ........ ix 

Woodrow Wilson ix 

His Literary Work ....... xi 

How the Great War Began xii 

Progress of the War xxi 

The United States and the War . . . . xxvi 

Some Important Dates xxxii 

Permanent Peace 3 

Address to United States Senate, January 22, 191 7 

Diplomatic Relations Broken 13 

Address to Congress, February 3, 191 7 

Armed Neutrality 19 

Address to Congress, February 26, 191 7 

Second Inaugural Address, March 5, 19 17 . . 26 

At War with Germany 32 

Address to Congress, April 2, 19 17 

The Declaration of War 46 

What We Are Fighting For 47 

Message to the Provisional Government of Russia, 
May 26, 191 7 

The Flag We Follow 51 

Speech on June 14, 191 7 

The Reply to the Pope's Proposal for Peace, 

August 27, 1917 61 

The American People Must Stand Together . . 66 
Address to Federation of Labor, November 12, 191 7 

vii 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

No Peace with Autocracy 77 

Message to Congress, December 4, 191 7 

The Program of Peace 92 

Address to Congress, January 8, 1918 

The Four Principles of Peace 102 

Address to Congress, February n, 19 iS 

Notes 113 



vm 



INTRODUCTION 

WOODROW WILSON: A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 

Woodrow Wilson, the twenty-eighth president of the 
United States, was born at Staunton, Virginia, on Decem- 
ber 28, 1856, of Scotch-Irish ancestry. His grandfather, 
James Wilson, came to Philadelphia from Ireland in 1807 
and became the publisher of a chain of newspapers. His 
wife was Anne Adams, an Ulster girl. Woodrow Wilson's 
father, Reverend Joseph Ruggles Wilson, was the young- 
est son of James Wilson, and was born in Steubenville, 
Ohio. He married Janet Woodrow, of Chillicothe, Ohio, 
daughter of Reverend Thomas Woodrow, a Scotch Presby- 
terian minister. In 1855 Reverend Joseph Wilson became 
pastor of a Presbyterian church in Staunton, Virginia, and 
here Thomas Woodrow Wilson was born. 

The Wilson family removed to Augusta, Georgia, before 
Woodrow was two years old. Thus his childhood was 
spent in the South during the Civil War. His first teacher 
was a Confederate veteran who had returned from four 
years of soldiering. In 1870 the family moved to Co- 
lumbia, South Carolina, where Woodrow attended a local 
academy. At the age of seventeen he entered David- 
son College, North Carolina, where he remained less than 
a year, because of ill health. In 1875 he entered Princeton 
College and graduated in 1879. H e was noted in his 
college days for his debating and literary ability and was 
editor of the Princetonian. In 1881 he graduated in law 
from the University of Virginia, and practiced law for a 

ix 



INTRODUCTION 

year in Atlanta, Georgia. Then he entered Johns Hop- 
kins University for post-graduate work in political science. 
He received the degree of Ph.D. in 1886, his thesis on 
" Congressional Government " being at once accepted as 
authoritative. For three years (1 885-1 888) Mr. Wilson 
taught at Bryn Mawr College, going then to Wesleyan 
University, Middletown, Connecticut, for two years (1888- 
1890). He was called to Princeton in 1890 as Professor 
of Jurisprudence and Political Economy. In 1902 he was 
made president of Princeton University, his term of office 
being noted for many important reforms, all of which were 
in the direction of the democratization of the institution. 

In 1 9 10 Mr. Wilson was urged to become a candidate for 
governor of New Jersey. He was elected as a Democrat 
in a state which had been Republican for sixteen years. 
As governor of New Jersey he was able to put into opera- 
tion many reforms which his long study of political phi- 
losophy had convinced him were wise. Among these were 
a direct-primary law and a corrupt-practices act which 
have since met with general acceptance in our political 
system. A law creating a public-utilities commission 
and establishing stringent control over corporations has 
generally been regarded a most salutary reform in 
dealing with the difficult matter of relationship be- 
tween the state and the corporations. Mr. Wilson's suc- 
cess in bringing about these reforms was so marked that 
he soon became a leading candidate for the presidency. 
At the Democratic National Convention in Baltimore 
in 191 2 Mr. Wilson was nominated on the forty-sixth 
ballot. A split in the Republican party that year made 
his election in November almost inevitable. Mr. Wilson 
received 435 electoral votes out of 531. 

As president, Mr. Wilson has acted along the same lines 
of progressive and constructive statesmanship which made 
x 



INTRODUCTION 

him so successful as president of Princeton and governor 
of New Jersey. He was reelected in November, 1916, for 
a second term. 



HIS LITERARY WORK 

The most remarkable and significant accomplishment of 
Woodrow Wilson's undergraduate college days was an 
article on "Cabinet Government in the United States," 
published in the International Review for August, 1879. 
The article is marked by a breadth of knowledge, range of 
vision, and independence of thought rarely found in a 
young man of twenty- three. The Princeton University 
library has an incomplete bibliography of the published 
writings and addresses of Woodrow Wilson. This list 
shows seventy-five titles for the twenty-five years between 
1875 and 1900. 

The following list includes some of the most important 
of his books and magazine articles : 

Congressional Government, A Study of American Politics. 1885. 

The State : Elements of History and Practical Politics. 1889. 

Division and Reunion. 1893. 

An Old Master and Other Political Essays. 1893. 

Mere Literature. 1896. 

History of the American People (5 vols.). 1901. 

Constitutional Government in the United States. 1908. 

Mr. Cleveland as President. Atlantic Monthly, March, 1897. 

The Makers of the Nation. Atlantic Monthly, July, 1897. 

On Being Human. Atlantic Monthly, September, 1897. 

A Lawyer with a Style. Atlantic Monthly, September, 1898. 

Reconstruction of the Southern States. Atlantic Monthly, 

January, 1901. 
Politics, 1857-1907. Atlantic Monthly, November, 1907. 
The States and the Federal Government. North American 

Review, May, 1908. 



INTRODUCTION 

Woodrow Wilson's style is marked by vivacity and 
incisiveness, and at times possesses considerable literary 
charm. Mr. Wilson is an independent thinker, of re- 
markable breadth of vision, and his discussions of political 
and historical questions are always clear and convincing. 
He makes few false motions, uses no superfluous words, 
but like a master workman makes all his strokes tell. An- 
other noteworthy quality of Woodrow Wilson, the writer, 
is the measured judgment and calm detachment with 
which he treats of subjects which ordinarily rouse men's 
passion to the boiling point. An early example of this 
characteristic is his essay on "Mr. Cleveland as Presi- 
dent" written before the end of Mr. Cleveland's second 
term. His war addresses are marked by the same cool 
judgment, the same clear independent thinking, the same 
range of vision, and the same incisive style which are 
characteristic of his earlier literary productions. One is 
never at a loss for his meaning : his words ring like steel on 
flint ; his judgment is never swayed by passion. 

HOW THE GREAT WAR BEGAN 

Underlying Causes. The murder of Archduke Francis 
Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, on 
June 28, 1914, set in motion a train of events which culmi- 
nated in the terrible catastrophe of a great world war. 
It was clear, however, to everyone familiar with history 
that this crime was not the real cause of the tremendous 
struggle which many of the statesmen of Europe had ex- 
pected and feared for years. The underlying causes of 
this great world war reach far back into the past and 
cannot easily be reduced to simple statements. A thor- 
ough knowledge of the important political and economic 
forces which have shaped the history of Europe for a 
xii 



INTRODUCTION 

century past would be needed for a full appreciation of 
these causes. Of all this network of clashing interests and 
antagonisms, there are three causes which seem to have 
contributed most largely toward bringing about the war. 
These are (i) the clashing of national interests and ideals 
in Europe; (2) the maintenance of a system of secret 
military alliances ; and (3) the economic rivalry of the 
nations of Europe. 

National Antagonisms. The history of Europe since the 
downfall of Napoleon has centered around two movements : 
the growth of democracy and the realization of national 
ideals. Here we must distinguish clearly between the 
ambitions of Rulers in Europe and the national ideals 
and desires of the various groups of People having a com- 
mon language and tradition. Italy achieved independ- 
ence and unity between 1859 and 1870; German unity 
was accomplished between 1864 and 1871. The success of 
these two nationalist movements aroused other nation- 
alities likewise to aspire to national unity and greatness. 
But there remained at the close of the nineteenth century 
a number of situations which clearly violated the prin- 
ciple of national sovereignty. The completion of German 
unity in 1 87 1 had been accomplished by the forcible annex- 
ation of Alsace and Lorraine, two provinces inhabited 
largely by persons of French blood and language. This 
was an ever-present challenge to the French to attempt 
to regain these lost provinces. The Italians had a griev- 
ance against Austria because certain strips of territory 
inhabited by Italians remained in Austrian hands. Po- 
land since the eighteenth century had been divided be- 
tween Prussia, Russia, and Austria. Austria-Hungary 
herself presented the nationalist problem in its most 
acute form. The Hapsburg dynasty, with its capital at 
Vienna, rules over a great number of countries and 

xiii 



INTRODUCTION 

provinces inhabited by many races speaking not less than 
ten distinct languages. One of its greatest difficulties 
has been to reconcile the interests of the German popula- 
tion of Austria proper with those of the Hungarians on 
the one hand and of the various Slavic peoples — Bohe- 
mians, Poles, Croats, Serbs, etc. — on the other. In 1867 
the Empire was divided into two practically independent 
countries : Austria, dominated by the German element, 
and Hungary, where the Hungarians are the rulers. This 
arrangement has been bitterly resented by the Slavs in the 
Empire because it has kept them in an inferior political 
position. The Austrian authorities, realizing that the 
triumph of nationalism would mean the disappearance of 
the Empire and its parceling out among the surrounding 
nations, have been fearful of all nationalist movements, — 
especially that of the southern Slavs. 

One of these groups, the Serbs, has been particularly 
active. Part of the Serbs lived in the provinces of Bosnia 
and Herzegovina, which, since 1908, have been a part of 
Austria. Others lived in the kingdoms of Serbia and Mon- 
tenegro, still others in Turkey in Europe. The ambition 
of the Pan-Serbian movement was to unite all these peo- 
ple of the Serbian race under one government — Greater 
Serbia. This Pan-Serbian movement was closely identi- 
fied with the assassination of the Crown Prince of Austria. 
The fear of Austria that the movement might succeed was 
an important motive in causing her to declare war on 
Serbia on July 28, 1914. 

Military Alliances. Bismarck, whose policy of "blood 
and iron" had brought about the German Empire, believed 
in a system of firm alliances as a guiding principle of states- 
manship. In an effort to isolate France, he strove to unite 
Russia, Germany, and Austria-Hungary in a defensive 
alliance (1872). Russia withdrew from this alliance in 
xiv 



INTRODUCTION 

1878 because of differences with Austria-Hungary. Later 
(1882) Italy joined with the Central Powers to form the 
Triple Alliance. This organization of the states of Cen- 
tral Europe into a strong military alliance was an invi- 
tation to the other states of Europe to create an opposing 
alliance in order to maintain the balance of power. France 
and Russia, drawn together by common distrust of Ger- 
many, formed a Dual Alliance in 1891. Later, in 1904, 
Great Britain, aroused by the threatening naval policy of 
Germany, abandoned her policy of isolation and made an 
agreement with France, and later another with Russia, 
thus forming what is generally known as the Triple En- 
tente. The existence of these two rival military groups 
created a situation whereby every political or diplomatic 
disturbance brought on a crisis. 

The first of these crises came in 1905 in a dispute over 
Morocco. Germany, after the downfall of Bismarck in 
1 89 1, had abandoned his policy of opposition to colonial 
expansion and was looking about for such stray bits of 
undeveloped land as had not already been appropriated by 
France and Great Britain. Germany had to choose be- 
tween two courses. Either she must accept the results 
of her late entrance into the field as a colonial power, or 
she must challenge the longer-established world powers 
and try to create for herself a "place in the sun." She 
chose the latter course. On March 21, 1905, the German 
Emperor, while on a voyage to Constantinople, stopped at 
Tangier and encouraged the Sultan of Morocco to reject 
the scheme for reform which had been proposed by France. 
Russia was in the midst of the political upheaval which 
accompanied the Russo-Japanese War and in no shape to 
aid France. So France was forced to submit to Ger- 
many's terms with reference to Morocco. A second Mo- 
roccan crisis occurred in 191 1. France made disorders in 

xv 



INTRODUCTION 

Morocco an occasion for penetrating into the interior, 
and Germany sent a gunboat to Agadir in Morocco as if 
with hostile intent. Matters came very close to war, 
but were settled by a considerable cession of Congo 
territory by France to Germany. 

Another phase of Germany's policy of expansion was the 
Drang nach Osten. 1 This policy contemplated the creation, 
in conjunction with Austria-Hungary, of a great economic 
sphere of influence extending through the Balkans to 
Constantinople and thence through Turkey to the Persian 
Gulf. So the German Emperor cultivated the friend- 
ship of the Sultan of Turkey; German officers trained 
the Turkish forces ; German engineers and German capi- 
talists began to develop Turkish resources. The whole 
scheme was crystallized into a plan for a Berlin-to-Bagdad 
railroad, which was in process of construction when war 
broke out in 1914. Following the revolution of 1908 in 
Turkey, Austria-Hungary, in furthering this eastward 
expansion, took the opportunity to annex Bosnia and 
Herzegovina. Russia protested against this violation of 
the Treaty of Berlin (1878) ; but Germany stood by 
her ally, and Russia, unready for war, was compelled to 
submit. 

For the neighboring state of Serbia this annexation 
was a serious blow. The annexed provinces were peopled 
with Slavs, and the Serbians had cherished the ambition 
of uniting with them and Montenegro in a new Slavonic 
state, Greater Serbia. Moreover, Serbia was now appar- 
ently shut off from the sea for all time to come, and so 
would be dependent for a market for her farm produce 
on Austria-Hungary. This would keep Serbia a weak 
and somewhat dependent state, which was what Austria 

1 Drang nach Osten, a German phrase meaning " push toward the 
east." 

xvi 



INTRODUCTION 

wanted. In the Balkan War of 1912-1913, however, 
Serbia burst her boundaries to the south and gained con- 
siderable territory. But her ambition to secure a sea- 
port on the Adriatic was blocked by her ancient enemy 
on the north. The Serbians were bitterly angry at this 
frustration of their plans by Austria. 

Nevertheless, Serbia gained considerable territory 
and greatly increased her power and influence by the 
Balkan War. It was Turkey, the friend of Germany, 
and Bulgaria, the friend of Austria-Hungary, that were 
defeated and lost prestige. That Germany appreciated 
the serious blow which had been dealt Teutonic influence 
in the Balkans was indicated by the passage in 19 13 of a 
new army bill appropriating over $250,000,000 to increase 
Germany's standing army to a peace footing of over 
700,000 and a war footing of nearly 10,000,000. Then it 
was the turn of France to be alarmed. She lengthened the 
term of compulsory military service from two years to 
three. Russia and Austria made similar moves, none of 
them completed in 19 14. 

Economic Causes. Some people have declared that the 
present war is a dispute over pigs, meaning that Serbia's 
market for her principal product was under the control 
of Austria-Hungary. This is a very much exaggerated 
way of saying what many economists believe, that this war, 
like many others, has been produced chiefly by economic 
causes, and is, in essence, a struggle for markets. The 
Industrial Revolution, which introduced the factory sys- 
tem into England in the eighteenth century, had helped 
make Great Britain the leading commercial nation of the 
world. The effects of the Industrial Revolution were not 
felt in Germany until after 1880, since which time Ger- 
man industries have made marvelous progress, and goods 
"made in Germany" have appeared in every market. 

xvii 



INTRODUCTION 

Great Britain, and Germany thus became dangerous com- 
mercial rivals. Germany's Drang nach Osten was inter- 
preted as an effort to secure some or all of the rich trade 
with India. Germany's increasing navy was undoubtedly 
intended to dispute Great Britain's supremacy on the seas 
and help German merchants secure wider markets. Like- 
wise, the hostility between Russia and Germany may be 
partly explained by the conflict of economic development. 
Russia, seriously needing more seaports to develop her re- 
sources, has long coveted Constantinople, whose control or 
possession was also a keystone in Germany's eastward 
expansion. In pursuance of her policy Russia has played 
the godmother to the various Balkan states and could 
hardly be indifferent to their humiliation or extinction. 

What has been said ought to make it clear that the 
European situation in 19 14 was a hair-trigger situa- 
tion, which needed only a slight disturbance to produce 
tremendous effects. 

Outbreak of the War. The hostility of the Serbs against 
Austria because of her annexation of Bosnia and Herze- 
govina in 1908 and her attitude toward Serbian expansion 
in 1912-1913, has been noted. In spite of this hostil- 
ity toward everything Austrian, on June 28, 1914, the 
Austrian Crown Prince and Princess made a visit to Sara- 
jevo, the capital of Bosnia. While riding through the 
streets of this city they were both slain by the bullets of 
a young Austrian Serb, who was an enthusiastic supporter 
of the Pan-Serbian ideals. This murder of the Austrian 
Crown Prince was interpreted in Austria-Hungary as a 
part of the Pan-Serbian movement, which aimed at the 
inclusion of Bosnia and Herzegovina in a Greater Serbia. 
In what followed, two motives actuated the Austrian rulers: 
(1) Serbia, much stronger as a result of the Balkan Wars 
of 1912-1913, lay in the path of the Drang nach Osten 
xviii 



INTRODUCTION 

ambition ; (2) the success of the Pan-Serbian movement 
might encourage other racial groups to seek independence 
and completely disrupt the Empire. Some have said that 
Austria's choice thus lay between a civil war and a foreign 
war. Austrian investigators " satisfied " themselves that 
the murder at Sarajevo had been planned in Belgrade with 
the knowledge and connivance of high Serbian officials. 
Wherefore, on July 23, 1914, Austria presented to Serbia 
an ultimatum, couched in the most vigorous language and 
demanding compliance within forty-eight hours. It was 
the sort of ultimatum which no nation presents to an equal 
unless it desires war; presented to a smaller nation like 
Serbia it could mean only war or the reduction of the 
smaller state to the position of a dependent vassal. 

Realizing that another crisis had arisen, the statesmen 
of Great Britain, France, and Russia strove first to secure 
an extension of time. It is a striking fact that all three 
of these countries were confronted by serious internal 
difficulties. Great Britain was threatened with civil war 
in Ireland over Home Rule ; Petrograd was involved in 
a great strike ; in France a government scandal had called 
from the Minister of War a declaration that the army was 
in a deplorable state of unpreparedness. Austria flatly 
refused any extension of time, and the British and Russian 
ministers persuaded Serbia to make as great a concession 
as possible. 

The Serbian reply was presented just two minutes before 
the expiration of the time limit. It yielded practically 
everything which Austria had demanded, so much so that 
the Russian minister declared that the crisis was over. 
The demand that Austrian officials should be allowed to 
sit in Serbian courts at the hearings was not yielded, but 
even this question Serbia offered to submit to the Hague 
Court for arbitration. Austria professed to find the answer 

xix 



INTRODUCTION 

unsatisfactory and on July 28 declared war on Serbia. 
In the meantime the Russian ambassador in Vienna had 
stated that "any action taken by Austria to humiliate 
Serbia could not leave Russia indifferent." Austria's 
action in declaring war, then, is explicable on only two 
grounds : either she was convinced that Russia was bluff- 
ing and would back down, or else Austria was prepared 
deliberately to bring on a general European war. 

Germany and Russia. Throughout all these negotia- 
tions Germany had backed Austria fully, refusing to make 
any move which might have helped in preserving the peace. 
Now Russia began to mobilize her armies. It became 
plain that the only hope for peace was to secure some 
agreement between Russia and Austria. Many efforts 
to this end were put forth, and on July 31 Austria finally 
agreed to discuss with Russia the terms of the ultimatum 
to Serbia. This slim chance of preventing a break at the 
eleventh hour was immediately nullified by an ultimatum 
delivered by Germany to Russia at midnight on July 31, 
demanding that Russia should cease military preparations 
and begin to demobilize her armies within twelve hours. 
Russia made no reply ; and at 5 p. m. on August 1 Germany 
declared war on Russia. This action necessarily involved 
war also on France, for France could hardly refuse to aid 
her ally. 

Germany and Belgium. In 1839 Great Britain, France, 
Austria, Russia, and Prussia joined in guaranteeing the in- 
dependence and perpetual neutrality of Belgium. Treaties 
between Great Britain and France and between Great 
Britain and Prussia, signed just before the Franco-Prussian 
War of 1870, pledged Great Britain to aid in defending the 
neutrality of Belgium if either belligerent violated it. 
In July, 1914, when war again became imminent, Great 
Britain tried to secure a renewal of this agreement of 1870. 
xx 



INTRODUCTION 

France expressed a willingness to make such an agreement ; 
but the German Government refused to agree to respect 
the neutrality of Belgium, and two days later, on August 2, 
demanded the right of passage through Belgian territory. 
Belgium returned a flat refusal and was invaded on 
August 4. Later, the same day, Great Britain declared 
war on Germany. That the German authorities realized 
the seriousness of this step is evidenced by the efforts of 
Chancellor von Bethmann-Hollweg and of the Kaiser to 
condone what each frankly admitted was a breach of inter- 
national law and a wrong, insisting, however, that military 
necessity demanded it. Von Bethmann-Hollweg added 
" Necessity knows no law." 

PROGRESS OF THE WAR 

The Invasion of France. The plan of campaign of the 
German general staff was for Austria together with a small 
number of German troops to hold the Russians in check 
while Germany crushed France, the two then uniting for 
a later campaign against Russia. Following this plan, the 
German armies, by a surprise thrust through Belgium in 
August, 1914, sought to paralyze the French armies. The 
German advance through Belgium was much slower than 
had been anticipated on account of the stiff fight put up 
by the little Belgian army. So it was August 24 before 
the frontier between France and Belgium was crossed. 
This delay gave the French time to rearrange their armies, 
and the surprise element was lost. General Joffre, who 
took command of the French armies on August 20, out- 
maneuvered the German field officers and, aided by the 
British, defeated the Germans in the great battle of 
the Marne, September 6-10, 1914. The Germans had 
nearly reached Paris, but now they retreated for some 

xxi 



INTRODUCTION 

miles and dug themselves in. Severe fighting raged 
throughout Flanders, but neither side was able to break 
through, and the conflict in the West settled down into the 
type of trench warfare which is the characteristic feature 
of this war. The battle of the Marne bids fair to be 
regarded as the decisive battle of the war. It was here 
that the plans of the German staff were definitely defeated. 
Paris was saved, and France was not crushed. 

The War in the East. In the meantime on the Eastern 
front the Russian armies had mobilized much more rapidly 
than had been believed possible. As early as August 17 
they invaded East Prussia and soon threatened the fortress 
of Konigsberg. But a skillful maneuver by the Ger- 
man general, von Hindenburg, around the Mazurian Lakes 
and a German victory at Tannenberg nearly succeeded 
in crushing the Russian armies in East Prussia. Other 
Russian armies had invaded Austrian Galicia, taken Lem- 
berg, and practically routed the Austrian armies sent to 
hold the frontier. Indeed, one of the contributing causes 
of the defeat of the Germans at the Marne was the neces- 
sity, at the critical moment, of sending eastward to stay 
the Russians several divisions from the armies opposing 
the French and British. The Eastern campaign of 1914 
ended with Russia in possession of a considerable part of 
Austrian Galicia, and Germany in possession of a fair slice 
of Russian Poland. 

During the winter of 1914-1915 the Russians pushed 
gradually forward into the passes of the Carpathians. In 
the spring of 191 5 they launched a great drive which carried 
them over the mountains into Hungary and won them 
the great fortress of Przemysl in western Galicia (March, 
191 5). Then a failure in the supply of ammunition caused 
a sudden reversal, and the summer of 191 5 saw the Rus- 
sians retreating rapidly, while place after place — Warsaw, 
xxii 



INTRODUCTION 

Brest-Litovsk, Vilna, and many others — fell into the 
hands of the Germans and Austrians, led by von Hinden- 
burg. By September, 191 5, the Teutonic Allies held prac- 
tically a straight line from Riga to the Rumanian frontier. 

Italy and the War. Italy, it will be remembered, was 
bound by the terms of the Triple Alliance to assist Ger- 
many and Austria-Hungary in case they should be at- 
tacked by other nations. Italy refused to aid her allies 
in August, 1 9 14, on the ground that Germany and Austria- 
Hungary were waging an aggressive instead of a defensive 
war. During the winter of 1914-1915 belligerent Italian 
patriots had warmly advocated their country's entrance 
into the war as an enemy of Austria-Hungary, hoping thus' 
to win the territory still held by Austria and inhabited by 
Italians. Austria offered various concessions in an effort 
to secure peace, but on May 23, 191 5, Italy declared war 
and undertook an invasion of Austria. This invasion, 
due to the mountainous character of the country and other 
handicaps, in over two years won very little territory for 
the Italians, and all of these gains were lost in the latter 
part of 1917. 

Conquest of Serbia. After two Austro-Hungarian at- 
tempts to invade Serbia had failed in August and Decem- 
ber, 1914, a new Austro-German invasion was undertaken 
in October, 191 5, under the direction of the German 
general, von Mackensen. Belgrade was captured October 
8, and a few days later, October 14, Bulgaria declared war 
and invaded Serbia from the southwest. The Serbian 
armies were thus caught between the two attacks and 
were speedily overcome. Aid which had been promised 
by Great Britain and France arrived too late. By the end 
of November the whole of Serbia had been conquered 
and overrun. The next two months saw the conquest 
of Montenegro. 

xxiii 



INTRODUCTION 

Turkey and the War. After Turkey entered the war in 
October, 1914, the Russians and British undertook several 
invasions. The most spectacular of these was the attempt 
of the British in February, 191 5, to force the Dardanelles 
and open the route to the Black Sea and South Russia. 
It was a brilliant conception, and its success would prob- 
ably have eliminated Turkey from the war and made 
possible the shipment of munitions and other supplies to 
Russia by the Black Sea route. The attack was badly 
managed, however, and in spite of brilliant righting by the 
Australian and New Zealand troops, ended in total failure. 
A Russian invasion of Turkish Armenia precipitated a 
general massacre of the Armenians by the Turks. The 
Russians gained some territory in this region. British 
invasions of the Euphrates valley and of Palestine, while 
they have gained some territory for the British, have thus 
far had no important effects on the war. 

Rumania and the War. Rumania entered the war in 
August, 191 6, believing the time was ripe to win the 
Transylvanian region which she had long coveted. The 
3,000,000 Rumanians who form the largest part of the 
population of Transylvania have been systematically 
deprived of rights by their Magyar rulers, and Rumania 
desired to liberate them from this oppression. Some 
early successes for her armies carried her invasion of 
Austria-Hungary as far as Hermannstadt. It was freely 
predicted that the utter exhaustion of the Teutonic Allies 
was at hand. Soon, however, Rumania was attacked from 
the south by Bulgaria, and on the north by fresh German 
and Austrian armies. Her defense collapsed ; the promised 
Russian aid did not arrive; and before the end of 191 6 
nearly the whole of Rumania was in the hands of her 
enemies. Early in 19 18, after the collapse of Russia, she 
was forced to sign a very humiliating peace treaty, 
xxiv 



INTRODUCTION 

Verdun. Since September, 19 14, all the terrific fighting 
on the Franco-Belgian line has resulted in gains which are 
measured in yards instead of miles. The most tremendous 
of these battles was fought before Verdun from February 
to June, 1 91 6. The German Crown Prince sacrificed 
enormous numbers of men and used vast quantities of 
ammunition in a sustained effort to break through the 
French lines at Verdun. His early attacks met with some 
success, but the French general, Petain, soon organized 
a brilliant defense. The French held Verdun, their 
lines were not broken; and since June, 1916, they have 
gradually won back all the territory lost in this battle. 

The Situation in 1917. By this time all the outlying 
possessions of the Germans had been taken by the British, 
French, and Japanese ; the British navy had kept the Ger- 
man navy bottled up in the Baltic, and not a German 
vessel, except submarines, attempted to sail the seas. 
The war had become trench warfare in all sections, and 
the year 191 7 saw no important changes of territory. 
A tremendous effort launched by the British and French 
against the Germans along the Somme late in 19 16 forced 
the Germans early in 191 7 to abandon considerable terri- 
tory in France and to retreat to previously prepared posi- 
tions. Later in the season a "big push" in the vicinity 
of Ypres forced the Germans to yield more territory to 
the British. 

In the summer of 191 7 the Italians gained territory 
on the Isonzo front ; but a tremendous Austro-German 
drive in the late autumn forced the Italians to aban- 
don all their gains, and the invaders nearly won Ven- 
ice. Elsewhere the fighting resulted in only minor 
changes of territory. 

The greatest change in the European situation in 191 7 
was brought about by the revolution in Russia in March. 



INTRODUCTION 

It had become plain that many of the high Russian officials, 
through treachery or greed for private profits, were block- 
ing every effort to make Russia efficient, and some, at 
least, were plotting with Germany to arrange a separate 
peace. In March a revolution overthrew the Czar and 
his German-plotting advisers. The Duma assumed con- 
trol of Russian affairs, and Russia entered the ranks of 
democratic nations. 

After the revolution in Russia her armies began to 
weaken. The Germans took Riga in September, 191 7, 
meeting with relatively slight resistance. In November, 
Kerensky, leader of the Socialist Labor party and prime 
minister since July, 1917, was forced to flee from Petro- 
grad, and the reins of government were seized by Le- 
nine and Trotzky, leaders of the ultra-radical Socialist 
party, generally called the Bolsheviki. This new gov- 
ernment undertook to make peace with Germany and 
Austria, with disastrous results for Russia. 

THE UNITED STATES AND THE WAR 

The Proclamation of Neutrality. The first effect of the 
outbreak of the Great War in August, 1914, upon the 
people of the United States was one of utter amazement 
and stupefaction at the collapse of European civilization. 
On August 18 President Wilson issued a proclamation of 
neutrality. Early in the war, however, the United States 
found the position of a neutral a trying one. The situa- 
tion was similar in many respects to that in Napoleon's 
day. The same vexing problems of neutral trade, of con- 
traband, and of blockade once more arose. The United 
States had more than one occasion to protest against what 
seemed to be unwarranted interference with American 
trade by the British — an interference which the British 
xxvi 



INTRODUCTION 

justified on the grounds that the German Government had 
seized all the food supplies in the Empire, making all 
food products contraband, and that much of our trade 
with Germany's neighbors was actually rinding its way 
into Germany, thus running the British blockade by 
indirection. 

The Submarine Warfare and the War Zone. Trade 
difficulties speedily sank into comparative insignificance, 
however, on account of the much more serious problem 
presented by the use of submarines. On February 4, 191 5, 
Germany declared the waters around the British Isles to 
be a war zone, within which zone it proposed to sink all 
enemy ships, whether armed or unarmed, and with utter 
disregard for the lives of passengers. On May 7 the 
world was horrified by the sinking of the unarmed Lusi- 
tania by a German submarine with a loss of 1152 lives, of 
whom 114 were known to be American citizens. Presi- 
dent Wilson immediately dispatched a note to the German 
Government expressing the concern and amazement of the 
United States at such wanton destruction of the lives of 
noncombatants. A long series of notes followed, Presi- 
dent Wilson trying by every means to avoid an open clash 
with Germany. At length, on May 4, 19 16, he secured a 
qualified pledge that the German Government would not 
sink merchant vessels "without warning and without 
saving human life unless the ship attempts to escape or 
offers resistance." 

Ruthless Submarine Warfare. Following the Sussex 
pledge, just referred to, a certain degree of restraint was 
observed by German submarine commanders for a period 
of nine months, though often the precautions taken were 
very meager and haphazard. On January 31, 191 7, the 
German Chancellor announced Germany's purpose to put 
aside all restraints of law and of humanity and use its 

xxvii 



INTRODUCTION 

submarines to sink every vessel that sought to approach 
the ports of Great Britain and Ireland or the western coasts 
of Europe or any of the ports controlled by the enemies 
of Germany within the Mediterranean. Said the German 
Chancellor on this occasion: "When the most ruthless 
methods are considered the best calculated to lead us to 
victory and to a swift victory, they must be employed. 
That moment has now arrived." The new policy swept 
every restriction aside. Vessels of every description, what- 
ever their flag, their character, their cargo, their destina- 
tion, their errand, were ruthlessly sent to the bottom with- 
out warning and without thought of help or mercy for those 
on board. Even hospital ships and ships carrying relief 
to the sorely bereaved people of Belgium, ships to which 
Germany had guaranteed safe passage, were sunk with 
the same reckless disregard of compassion or of principle. 
The German ambassador to Argentina even advised that 
certain Argentine vessels be sunk without leaving a trace. 
In all, before April, 191 7, 686 neutral vessels had been 
sunk by German submarines, and 226 American citizens 
had been the victims of Germany's submarine warfare. 
Said President Wilson : " Property can be paid for ; the 
lives of peaceful and innocent people cannot be paid 
for. The present German submarine warfare is a warfare 
against mankind." 

Position of the United States. The Government and 
people of the United States had been amazed at the viola- 
tion of Belgian neutrality ; they had been horrified by the 
sinking of the Lusitania; they had listened unbelievingly 
to the tales of German cruelty to women and children in 
conquered territory ; they had been dumfounded at the 
effrontery of the German Government's replies to President 
Wilson's many notes. Now they were roused to action. 
It was plain that the most sacred rights of our nation and 
xxviii 



INTRODUCTION 

our people were being ignored and violated. In March 
it was revealed that the German Government, in January, 
191 7, before there were any indications of hostile action 
on our part, had tried to induce Mexico and Japan to join 
in a war against us. German money was being spent freely 
to influence public and congressional opinion. It was 
plain that the peril was nearer than we had dreamed. 
The very existence of democratic governments was 
threatened by the Prussian autocracy. The course of the 
German Government became in fact nothing less than war 
against the United States, and on April 2 President Wilson 
asked Congress to declare that a state of war with Ger- 
many existed. Congress acted with surprising unanimity, 
and on April 6 the momentous resolution was formally 
passed. 

The New Purpose in the War. Whatever may have been 
the motives of the nations in beginning the Great War, 
the Russian revolution and the entrance of the United 
States into the struggle have given it a new purpose. It 
has become a war of Democracy against Autocracy, a war 
to determine whether the ideals of America or the ideals 
of Prussia are to rule the world. 

Contrast these two standards. Von Bethmann-Hollweg 
when addressing the Reichstag, August 4, 1914, spoke 
thus : 

We are now in a state of necessity, and necessity knows no 
law. Our troops have occupied (neutral) Luxemburg and 
perhaps already have entered Belgian territory. Gentlemen, 
this is a breach of international law. The wrong — I speak 
openly — the wrong we hereby commit we will try to make 
good as soon as our military aims have been attained. 

He who is menaced as we are, and is fighting for his highest 
possession, can only consider how he is to hack his way 
through. 

xxix 



INTRODUCTION 

Frederick the Great, the arch-prophet of Prussianism, 
speaking in 1 740, gave the keynote to all his successors : 

The question of right is an affair of ministers. ... It is 
time to consider it in secret, for the orders to my troops have 
been given. 

And again, relative to the seizure of Silesia from 
Austria, 

Take what you can ; you are never wrong unless you are 
obliged to give back. 

The Emperor's advice and admonition of July 27, 1900, 
to the German troops, just before they left to take part 
in the suppression of the Boxer Rebellion in China : 

As soon as you come to blows with the enemy he will be 
beaten. No mercy will be shown!. No prisoners will be 
taken! As the Huns, under King Attila, made a name for 
themselves, which is still mighty in traditions and legends, 
may the name of German be so fixed in China by your deeds 
that no Chinese shall ever again dare even to look at a 
German askance. . . . Open the way for Kultur once for all. 

Against this set the words of the first president of the 
young American republic, speaking at a time when the 
nation was so weak that surely any kind of shifts could 
have been justified on the score of necessity. 

Said George Washington in his first inaugural address 
(1789) : 

The foundation of our national policy will be laid in the pure 
and immutable principles of private morality, and the pre- 
eminence of free government be exemplified by all the attri- 
butes which can win the affections of its citizens and command 
the respect of the world. 

Or again, in his farewell address (1796) : 

Observe good faith and justice toward all nations; culti- 
vate peace and harmony with all. ... It will be worthy of a 



INTRODUCTION 

free, enlightened, and, at no distant period, a great nation, to 
give to mankind the magnanimous and too novel example of 
a people always guided by an exalted justice and benevolence. 

Breathing the same spirit of justice and mercy are the 
words of Lincoln spoken when the nation was in the midst 
of Civil War. His second inaugural closes thus : 

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness 
in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us finish the 
work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him 
who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his 
orphans, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and 
lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations. 

The United States enters this war in the same spirit 
which actuated its founders and its greatest leaders. Our 
purpose in the war was clearly set forth by President Wil- 
son in his message to Congress on April 2 : 

We are accepting this challenge of hostile purpose because 
we know that in such a Government, following such methods, 
we can never have a friend; and that in the presence of its 
organized power, always lying in wait to accomplish we know 
not what purpose, there can be no assured security for the demo- 
cratic Governments of the world. 

We are now about to accept the gauge of battle with this natural 
foe to liberty, and shall, if necessary, spend the whole force of the 
nation to check and nullify its pretensions and its power. We 
are glad, now that we see the facts with no veil of false pre- 
tense about them, to fight thus for the ultimate peace of the world 
and for the liberation of its peoples, the German peoples included; 
for the rights of nations great and small and the privilege of men 
everywhere to choose their way of life and of obedience. 

The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must 
be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty. 

We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest, 
no dominion. We seek no indemnities for ourselves, no mate- 
rial compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make. We 



INTRODUCTION 

are but one of the champions of the rights of mankind. We 
shall be satisfied when those rights have been made as secure 
as the faith and the freedom of nations can make them. 

Just because we fight without rancor and without selfish 
objects, seeking nothing for ourselves but what we shall wish 
to share with all free peoples, we shall, I feel confident, conduct 
our operations as belligerents without passion and ourselves 
observe with proud punctilio the principles of right and of fair 
play we profess to be fighting for. 



SOME IMPORTANT DATES 

July 28, 1914 : Austria-Hungary declares war on Serbia. 
August 1, 1914 : Germany declares war on Russia. 
August 3, 1 9 14 : Germany declares war on France. 
August 4, 1914 (a.m.) : Germany invades Belgium. 
August 4, 1914 (p. m.) : Great Britain declares war on Germany. 
August 6, 1 9 14 : Austria-Hungary declares war on Russia. 
August 8, 1 9 14 : Montenegro declares war on Austria-Hungary. 
August 23, 1914: Japan declares war on Germany. 
October 29, 1914: Turkey attacks Russia. 
May 23, 191 5 : Italy declares war on Austria-Hungary. 
October 14, 1915 : Bulgaria declares war on Serbia. 
August 28, 1916 : Rumania declares war on Austria-Hungary. 
April 6, 1917 : United States declares war on Germany. 
December 7, 1917: United States declares war on Austria- 
Hungary. 



xxxn 



WAR ADDRESSES OF WOODROW WILSON 



PERMANENT PEACE 

Address to the United States Senate, January 22, 191 7 

Gentlemen of the Senate: 

On the 1 8th of December last I addressed an identic 
note to the Governments of the nations now at war, 
requesting them to state, more definitely than they 
had yet been stated by either group of belligerents, 
the terms upon which they would deem it possible 
to make peace. I spoke on behalf of humanity and 
of the rights of all neutral nations like our own, 
many of whose most vital interests the war puts in 
constant jeopardy. 

The Central Powers united in a reply which stated 
merely that they were ready to meet their antagonists 
in conference to discuss terms of peace. 

The Entente Powers have replied much more 
definitely, and have stated, in general terms, indeed, 
but with sufficient definiteness to imply details, the 
arrangements, guaranties, and acts of reparation 
which they deem to be the indispensable conditions of 
a satisfactory settlement. 

We are that much nearer a definite discussion of the 
peace which shall end the present war. We are that 
much nearer the discussion of the international concept 
which must hereafter hold the world at peace. In 

3 



WAR ADDRESSES OF WOODROW WILSON 

every discussion of the peace that must end this war 
it is taken for granted that that peace must be fol- 
lowed by some definite concert of power, which will 
make it virtually impossible that any such catas- 
trophe should ever overwhelm us again. Every lover 
of mankind, every sane and thoughtful man, must 
take that for granted. 

I have sought this opportunity to address you because 
I thought that I owed it to you, as the council asso- 
ciated with me * in the final determination of our in- 
ternational obligations, to disclose to you without 
reserve the thought and purpose that have been taking 
form in my mind in regard to the duty of our Govern- 
ment in those days to come when it will be necessary 
to lay afresh and upon a new plan the foundations of 
peace among the nations. 

It is inconceivable that the people of the United 
States should play no part in that great enterprise. 
To take part in such a service will be the opportunity 
for which they have sought to prepare themselves by 
the very principles and purposes of their polity and 
the approved practices of their Government, ever since 
the days when they set up a new nation in the high and 
honorable hope that it might in all that it was and did 
show mankind the way to liberty. They cannot, in 
honor, withhold the service to which they are now 
about to be challenged. They do not wish to withhold 
it. But they owe it to themselves and to the other 
nations of the world to state the conditions under 
which they will feel free to render it. 

That service is nothing less than this : to add their 
authority and their power to the authority and force 
4 



PERMANENT PEACE 

of other nations to guarantee peace and justice through- 
out the world. Such a settlement cannot now be 
long postponed. It is right that before it comes this 
Government should frankly formulate the conditions 
upon which it would feel justified in asking our people 
to approve its formal and solemn adherence to a 
league for peace. I am here to attempt to state 
those conditions. 

The present war must first be ended, but we owe 
it to candor and to a just regard for the opinion of 
mankind to say that, so far as our participation in 
guarantees of future peace is concerned, it makes a 
great deal of difference in what way and upon what 
terms it is ended. The treaties and agreements which 
bring it to an end must embody terms which will 
create a peace that is worth guaranteeing and pre- 
serving, a peace that will win the approval of man- 
kind, not merely a peace that will serve the several 
interests and immediate aims of the nations engaged. 

We shall have no voice in determining what those 
terms shall be, 2 but we shall, I feel sure, have a voice 
in determining whether they shall be made lasting 
or not by the guarantees of a universal covenant, 
and our judgment upon what is fundamental and 
essential as a condition precedent to permanency 
should be spoken now, not afterward, when it may 
be too late. 

No covenant of cooperative peace that does not 
include the peoples of the New World can suffice to 
keep the future safe against war, and yet there is 
only one sort of peace that the peoples of America 
could join in guaranteeing. 

5 



WAR ADDRESSES OF WOODROW WILSON 

The elements of that peace must be elements that 
engage the confidence and satisfy the principles of the 
American Governments, elements consistent with their 
political faith and the practical conviction which the 
peoples of America have once for all embraced and 
undertaken to defend. 

I do not mean to say that any American Government 
would throw any obstacle in the way of any terms of 
peace the Governments now at war might agree upon, 
or seek to upset them when made, whatever they might 
be. I only take it for granted that mere terms of 
peace between the belligerents will not satisfy even 
the belligerents themselves. Mere agreements may 
not make peace secure. It will be absolutely neces- 
sary that a force 3 be created as a guarantor of the 
permanency of the settlement so much greater than 
the force of any nation now engaged or any alliance 
hitherto formed or projected, that no nation, no 
probable combination of nations, could face or with- 
stand it. If the peace presently to be made is to 
endure, it must be a peace made secure by the organ- 
ized major force of mankind. 

The terms of the immediate peace agreed upon will 
determine whether it is a peace for which such a 
guarantee can be secured. The question upon which 
the whole future peace and policy of the world de- 
pends is this : 

Is the present war a struggle for a just and secure 
peace or only for a new balance of power ? 4 If it be 
only a struggle for a new balance of power, who will 
guarantee, who can guarantee, the stable equilibrium 
of the new arrangement? Only a tranquil Europe 
6 



PERMANENT PEACE 

can be a stable Europe. There must be not only a 
balance of power, but a community of power; not 
organized rivalries, but an organized common peace. 

Fortunately, we have received very explicit assur- 
ances on this point. The statesmen of both of the 
groups of nations now arrayed against one another 
have said, in terms that could not be misinterpreted, 
that it was no part of the purpose they had in mind to 
crush their antagonists. But the implications of these 
assurances may not be equally clear to all, may not 
be the same on both sides of the water. I think it 
will be serviceable if I attempt to set forth what we 
understand them to be. 

They imply first of all that it must be a peace with- 
out victory. 5 It is not pleasant to say this. I beg 
that I may be permitted to put my own interpreta- 
tion upon it and that it may be understood that no 
other interpretation was in my thought. I am seek- 
ing only to face realities and to face them without 
soft concealments. Victory would mean peace forced 
upon the loser, a victor's terms imposed upon the 
vanquished. It would be accepted in humiliation, 
under duress, at an intolerable sacrifice, and would 
leave a sting, a resentment, a bitter memory, upon 
which terms of peace would rest, not permanently, 
but only as upon quicksand. 

Only a peace between equals can last ; only a peace 
the very principle of which is equality and a common 
participation in a common benefit. The right is as 
necessary for a lasting peace as is the just settlement 
of vexed questions of territory or of racial and national 
allegiance. 

7 



WAR ADDRESSES OF WOODROW WILSON 

The equality of nations, upon which peace must be 
founded, if it is to last, must be an equality of rights ; 
the guarantees exchanged must neither recognize nor 
imply a difference between big nations and small, 
between those that are powerful and those that are 
weak. Right must be based upon the common 
strength, not upon the individual strength, of the 
nations upon whose concert peace will depend. 

Equality of territory, of resources, there, of course, 
cannot be ; nor any other sort of equality not gained 
in the ordinary peaceful and legitimate development 
of the peoples themselves. But no one asks or ex- 
pects anything more than an equality of rights. 
Mankind is looking now for freedom of life, not for 
equipoises of power. 

And there is a deeper thing involved than even 
equality of rights among organized nations. No 
peace can last, or ought to last, which does not recog- 
nize and accept the principle that Governments derive 
all their just powers from the consent of the governed, 
and that no right anywhere exists to hand peoples 
about from sovereignty to sovereignty as if they were 
property. 6 

I take it for granted, for instance, if I may venture 
upon a single example, that statesmen everywhere are 
agreed that there should be a united, independent, 
and autonomous Poland, and that henceforth inviola- 
ble security of life, of worship, and of industrial 
and social development should be guaranteed to all 
peoples who have lived hitherto under the power of 
governments devoted to a faith and purpose hostile 
to their own. 
8 



PERMANENT PEACE 

I speak of this not because of any desire to exalt 
an abstract political principle which has always been 
held very dear by those who have sought to build 
up liberty in America, but for the same reason that 
I have spoken of the other conditions of peace, which 
seem to me clearly indispensable — because I wish 
frankly to uncover realities. Any peace that does 
not recognize and accept this principle will inevitably 
be upset. It will not rest upon the affections or the 
convictions of mankind. The ferment of spirit of 
whole populations will fight subtly and constantly 
against it, and all the world will sympathize. The 
world can be at peace only if its life is stable, and 
there can be no stability where the will is in rebellion, 
where there is not tranquillity of spirit and a sense of 
justice, of freedom, and of right. 

So far as practicable, moreover, every great people 
now struggling toward a full development of its re- 
sources and of its powers should be assured a direct 
outlet to the great highways of the sea. Where this 
cannot be done by the cession of territory, it can no 
doubt be done by the neutralization of direct rights 
of way under the general guarantee which will assure 
peace itself. With a right comity of arrangement no 
nation need be shut away from free access to the 
open paths of the world's commerce. 7 

And the paths of the sea must alike in law and in 
fact be free. The freedom of the seas is the sine qua 
non of peace, equality, and cooperation. No doubt a 
somewhat radical reconsideration of many of the rules 
of international practice hitherto sought, to be estab- 
lished may be necessary in order to make the seas 

9 



WAR ADDRESSES OF WOODROW WILSON 

indeed free and common in practically all circum- 
stances for the use of mankind, but the motive for 
such changes is convincing and compelling. There 
can be no trust or intimacy between the peoples of 
the world without them. 

The free, constant, unthreatened intercourse of 
nations is an essential part of the process of peace 
and of development. It need not be difficult to define 
or to secure the freedom of the seas if the Govern- 
ments of the world sincerely desire to come to an 
agreement concerning it. 

It is a problem closely connected with the limita- 
tion of naval armaments and the cooperation of the 
navies of the world in keeping the seas at once free 
and safe. 

And the question of limiting naval armaments opens 
the wider and perhaps more difficult question of the 
limitation of armies and of all programs of military 
preparation. Difficult and delicate as these questions 
are, they must be faced with the utmost candor and 
decided in a spirit of real accommodation if peace is 
to come with healing in its wings and come to stay. 

Peace cannot be had without concession and sacri- 
fice. There can be no sense of safety and equality 
among the nations if great preponderating armies are 
henceforth to continue here and there to be built up 
and maintained. The statesmen of the world must 
plan for peace, and nations must adjust and accom- 
modate their policy to it as they have planned for 
war and made ready for pitiless contest and rivalry. 
The question of armaments, whether on land or 
sea, is the most immediately and intensely practical 
10 



PERMANENT PEACE 

question connected with the future fortunes of nations 
and of mankind. 

I have spoken upon these great matters without 
reserve, and with the utmost explicitness because it 
has seemed to me to be necessary if the world's yearn- 
ing desire for peace was anywhere to find free voice 
and utterance. Perhaps I am the only person in high 
authority among all the peoples of the world who is at 
liberty to speak and hold nothing back. 8 I am speak- 
ing as an individual, and yet I am speaking also, of 
course, as the responsible head of a great Govern- 
ment, and I feel confident that I have said what the 
people of the United States would wish me to say. 9 

May I not add that I hope and believe that I am, 
in effect, speaking for liberals and friends of humanity 
in every nation and of every program of liberty? I 
would fain believe that I am speaking for the silent 
mass of mankind everywhere who have as yet had 
no place or opportunity to speak their real hearts out 
concerning the death and ruin they see to have come 
already upon the persons and the homes they hold 
most dear. 

And in holding out the expectation that the people 
and the Government of the United States will join 
the other civilized nations of the world in guarantee- 
ing the permanence of peace upon such terms as I 
have named, I speak with the greater boldness and 
confidence because it is clear to every man who can 
think that there is in this promise no breach in either 
our traditions or our policy as a nation, but a ful- 
filment rather of all that we have professed or 
striven for. 

ii 



WAR ADDRESSES OF WOODROW WILSON 

I am proposing, as it were, that the nations should 
with one accord adopt the doctrine of President 
Monroe as the doctrine of the world : That no nation 
should seek to extend its policy over any other nation 
or people, but that every people should be left free 
to determine its own policy, its own way of develop- 
ment, unhindered, unthreatened, unafraid, the little 
along with the great and powerful. 

I am proposing that all nations henceforth avoid 
entangling alliances which would draw them into com- 
petition of power, catch them in a net of intrigue and 
selfish rivalry, and disturb their own affairs with in- 
fluences intruded from without. 10 There is no en- 
tangling alliance in a concert of power. When all 
unite to act in the same sense and with the same pur- 
pose, all act in the common interest and are free to 
live their own lives under a common protection. 

I am proposing government by the consent of the 
governed ; that freedom of the seas which in inter- 
national conference after conference u representatives 
of the United States have urged with the eloquence of 
those who are the convinced disciples of liberty ; and 
that moderation of armaments which makes of armies 
and navies a power for order merely, not an instru- 
ment of aggression or of selfish violence. 

These are American principles, American policies. 
We can stand for no others. And they are also the 
principles and policies of forward-looking men and 
women everywhere, of every modern nation, of every 
enlightened community. They are the principles of 
mankind and must prevail. 



12 



DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS BROKEN 

Address to Congress, February 3, 1917 

Gentlemen of the Congress : 

The Imperial German Government on the 31st 
day of January announced to this Government and 
to the Governments of the other neutral nations that 
on and after the 1st day of February, the present 
month, it would adopt a policy with regard to the 
use of submarines against all shipping seeking to pass 
through certain designated areas of the high seas, to 
which it is clearly my duty to call your attention. 

Let me remind the Congress that on the 18th of 
April last, in view of the sinking on the 24th of March, 
of the cross-channel steamship Sussex l by a German 
submarine without summons or warning, and the 
consequent loss of lives of several citizens of the 
United States who were passengers aboard her, this 
Government addressed a note to the Imperial Ger- 
man Government, in which it made the following 
declaration : 

If it is still the purpose of the Imperial German Govern- 
ment to prosecute relentless and indiscriminate warfare 
against vessels of commerce by the use of submarines 
without regard to what the Government of the United 
States must consider the sacred and indisputable rules of 
international law and the universally recognized dictates 

13 



WAR ADDRESSES OF WOODROW WILSON 

of humanity, the Government of the United States is at 
last forced to the conclusion that there is but one course 
it can pursue. 2 Unless the Imperial Government should 
now immediately declare and effect an abandonment of its 
present methods of submarine warfare against passenger- 
and freight-carrying vessels, the Government of the United 
States can have no choice but to sever diplomatic relations 
with the German Empire altogether. 

In reply to this declaration the Imperial German 
Government gave this Government the following 
assurance : 

The German Government is prepared to do its utmost to 
confine the operations of war for the rest of its duration 
to the fighting forces of the belligerents, thereby also 
insuring the freedom of the seas, a principle upon which 
the German Government believes itself now, as before, to 
be in agreement with the Government of the United 
States. 

The German Government, guided by this idea, notifies 
the Government of the United States that the German 
naval forces have received the following orders : In ac- 
cordance with the general principles of visit and search and 
destruction of merchant vessels recognized by international 
law, such vessels, both within and without the area de- 
clared a naval war zone, shall not be sunk without warning 
and without saving human lives, unless these ships attempt 
to escape or offer resistance. 3 

But [it added], neutrals cannot expect that Germany, 
forced to fight for her existence, shall, for the sake of neu- 
tral interest, restrict the use of an effective weapon if her 
enemy is permitted to continue to apply at will methods 
of warfare violating the rules of international law. Such 
a demand would be incompatible with the character of 

14 



DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS BROKEN 

neutrality, and the German Government is convinced that 
the Government of the United States does not think of 
making such a demand, knowing that the Government of 
the United States has repeatedly declared that it is deter- 
mined to restore the principle of the freedom of the seas, 
from whatever quarter it has been violated. 

To this the Government of the United States replied 
on the 8th of May, accepting, of course, the assur- 
ance given, but adding : 

The Government of the United States feels it necessary 
to state that it takes it for granted that the Imperial 
German Government does not intend to imply that the 
maintenance of its newly announced policy is in any way 
contingent upon the course or result of diplomatic nego- 
tiations between the Government of the United States 
and any other belligerent Government, notwithstanding 
the fact that certain passages in the Imperial Government's 
note of the 4th inst. might appear to be susceptible of that 
construction. In order, however, to avoid any misunder- 
standing, the Government of the United States notifies 
the Imperial Government that it cannot for a moment 
entertain, much less discuss, a suggestion that respect by 
German naval authorities for the rights of citizens of the 
United States upon the high seas should in any way or in 
the slightest degree be made contingent upon the conduct 
of any other Government affecting the rights of neutrals 
and noncombatants. Responsibility in such matters is 
single, not joint ; absolute, not relative. 

To this note of the 8th of May the Imperial Ger- 
man Government made no reply. 4 

On the 31st of January, the Wednesday of 
the present week, the German Ambassador handed 

15 



WAR ADDRESSES OF WOODROW WILSON 

to the Secretary of State, along with a formal 
note, a memorandum which contained the following 
statement : 

The Imperial Government, therefore, does not doubt that 
the Government of the United States will understand the 
situation thus forced upon Germany by the Entente 
Allies' brutal methods of war and by their determination 
to destroy the Central Powers, 5 and that the Government 
of the United States will further realize that the now 
openly disclosed intention of the Entente Allies gives back 
to Germany the freedom of action which she reserved in 
her note addressed to the Government of the United 
States on May 4th, 19 16. 

Under these circumstances, Germany will meet the 
illegal measures of her enemies by forcibly preventing, 
after Feb. 1st, 191 7, in a zone around Great Britain, 
France, Italy, and in the Eastern Mediterranean, all navi- 
gation, that of neutrals included, from and to England 
and from and to France, etc. All ships met within the 
zone will be sunk. 

I think that you will agree with me that, in view of 
this declaration, which suddenly and without prior 
intimation of any kind deliberately withdraws the 
solemn assurance given in the Imperial Government's 
note of the 4th of May, 191 6, this Government has no 
alternative consistent with the dignity and honor of 
the United States but to take the course, which, in its 
note on the 18th of April, 191 6, it announced that it 
would take in the event that the German Govern- 
ment did not declare and effect an abandonment of the 
methods of submarine warfare which it was then em- 
ploying and to which it now purposes again to resort. 
16 



DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS BROKEN 

I have therefore directed the Secretary of State to 
announce to his Excellency the German Ambassador 
that all diplomatic relations between the United 
States and the German Empire are severed and that 
the American Ambassador to Berlin will immediately 
be withdrawn ; and, in accordance with this decision, 
to hand to his Excellency his passports. 

Notwithstanding this unexpected action of the 
German Government, this sudden and deplorable re- 
nunciation of its assurances, given this Government 
at one of the most critical moments of tension in the 
relations of the two Governments, I refuse to believe 
that it is the intention of the German authorities to 
do in fact what they have warned us they will feel 
at liberty to do. I cannot bring myself to believe 
that they will indeed pay no regard to the ancient 
friendship between their people and our own or to 
the solemn obligations which have been exchanged 
between them, and destroy American ships and take 
the lives of American citizens in the willful prose- 
cution of the ruthless naval program they have 
announced their intention to adopt. Only actual 
overt acts on their part can make me believe it 
even now. 6 

If this inveterate confidence on my part in the 
sobriety and prudent foresight of their purpose should 
unhappily prove unfounded; if American ships and 
American lives should in fact be sacrificed by their 
naval commanders in heedless contravention of the 
just and reasonable understandings of international 
law and the obvious dictates of humanity, I shall 
take the liberty of coming again before the Congress 

17 



WAR ADDRESSES OF WOODROW WILSON 

to ask that authority be given me to use any means 
that may be necessary for the protection of our sea- 
men and our people in the prosecution of their peace- 
ful and legitimate errands on the high seas. I can 
do nothing less. I take it for granted that all neutral 
Governments will take the same course. 

We do not desire any hostile conflict with the Im- 
perial German Government. We are the sincere 
friends of the German people, and earnestly desire to 
remain at peace with the Government that speaks for 
them. We shall not believe that they are hostile to 
us unless and until we are obliged to believe it ; and 
we purpose nothing more than the reasonable defense 
of the undoubted rights of our people. We wish to 
serve no selfish ends. We seek merely to stand true 
alike in thought and in action to the immemorial 
principles of our people, which I have sought to ex- 
press in my address to the Senate only two weeks 
ago — seek merely to vindicate our right to liberty 
and justice and an unmolested life. These are the 
bases of peace, not war. God grant that we may 
not be challenged to defend them by acts of willful 
injustice on the part of the Government of Germany ! 



18 



ARMED NEUTRALITY 

Address to Congress, February 26, 191 7 

Gentlemen of the Congress : 

I have again asked the privilege of addressing you 
because we are moving through critical times during 
which it seems to me to be my duty to keep in close 
touch with the houses of Congress, so that neither 
counsel nor action shall run at cross purposes 
between us. 

On the 3d of February I officially informed you 
of the sudden and unexpected action of the Imperial 
German Government in declaring its intention to 
disregard the promises it had made to this Govern- 
ment in April last and undertake immediate sub- 
marine operations against all commerce, whether of 
belligerents or of neutrals, that should seek to approach 
Great Britain and Ireland, the Atlantic coasts of 
Europe or the harbors of the eastern Mediterranean, 
and to conduct these operations without regard to 
the established restrictions of international practice, 
without regard to any considerations of humanity, 
even, which might interfere with their object. That 
policy was forthwith put into practice. It has now 
been in active execution for nearly four weeks. 

19 



WAR ADDRESSES OF WOODROW WILSON 

Its practical results are not yet fully disclosed. The 
commerce of other neutral nations is suffering severely, 
but not, perhaps, very much more severely than it 
was already suffering before the ist of February, 
when the new policy of the Imperial Government was 
put into operation. We have asked the cooperation 
of the other neutral Governments to prevent these 
depredations, but so far none of them has thought it 
wise to join us in any common course of action. Our 
own commerce has suffered, is suffering, rather in 
apprehension than in fact, rather because so many of 
our ships are timidly keeping to their home ports 
than because American ships have been sunk. 

Two American vessels have been sunk, the 
Housatonic and the Lyman M. Law. The case of 
the Housatonic, which was carrying foodstuffs con- 
signed to a London firm, was essentially like the case 
of the Frye, 1 in which, it will be recalled, the German 
Government admitted its liability for damages, and 
the lives of the crew, as in the case of the Frye, were 
safeguarded with reasonable care. The case of the 
Law, which was carrying lemon box staves to Palermo, 
disclosed a ruthlessness of method which deserves 
grave condemnation, but was accompanied by no 
circumstances which might not have been expected 
at any time in connection with the use of the sub- 
marine against merchantmen as the German Govern- 
ment has used it. 

In sum, therefore, the situation we find ourselves 

in with regard to the actual conduct of the German 

submarine warfare against commerce and its effects 

upon our own ships and people is substantially the 

20 



ARMED NEUTRALITY 

same that it was when I addressed you on the 3d of 
February, except for the tying up of our shipping in 
our own ports because of the unwillingness of our 
shipowners to risk their vessels at sea without insur- 
ance or adequate protection, and the very serious 
congestion of our commerce which has resulted, a 
congestion which is growing rapidly more and more 
serious every day. This in itself might presently 
accomplish, in effect, what the new German sub- 
marine orders were meant to accomplish, so far as 
we are concerned. 

We can only say, therefore, that the overt act 
which I have ventured to hope the German com- 
manders would in fact avoid has not occurred. 

But while this is happily true, it must be admitted 
that there have been certain additional indications and 
expressions of purpose on the part of the German press 
and the German authorities which have increased 
rather than lessened the impression that, if our ships 
and our people are spared, it will be because of 
fortunate circumstances or because the commanders of 
the German submarines which they may happen to 
encounter exercise an unexpected discretion and re- 
straint rather than because of the instructions under 
which those commanders are acting. It would be 
foolish to deny that the situation is fraught with the 
gravest possibilities and dangers. No thoughtful man 
can fail to see that the necessity for definite action 
may come at any time, if we are in fact and not in 
word merely to defend our elementary rights as a 
neutral nation. It would be most imprudent to be 
unprepared. 

21 



WAR ADDRESSES OF WOODROW WILSON 

I cannot in such circumstances be unmindful of 
the fact that the expiration of the term of the present 
Congress is immediately at hand, by constitutional 
limitation ; and that it would in all likelihood require 
an unusual length of time to assemble and organize the 
Congress which is to succeed it. I feel that I ought, 
in view of the fact, to obtain from you full and imme- 
diate assurance of the authority which I may need at 
any moment to exercise. No doubt I already possess 
that authority without special warrant of law, by the 
plain implication of my constitutional duties and 
powers ; but I prefer, in the present circumstances, 
not to act upon general implication. I wish to feel 
that the authority and the power of the Congress 
are behind me in whatever it may become necessary 
for me to do. We are jointly the servants of the 
people and must act together and in their spirit, so 
far as we can divine and interpret it. 2 

No one doubts what it is our duty to do. We 
must defend our commerce and the lives of our people 
in the midst of the present trying circumstances, with 
discretion but with clear and steadfast purpose. 3 Only 
the method and the extent remain to be chosen, upon 
the occasion, if occasion should indeed arise. Since 
it has unhappily proved impossible to safeguard our 
neutral right by diplomatic means against the unwar- 
ranted infringements they are suffering at the hands 
of Germany, there may be no recourse but to armed 
neutrality, which we shall know how to maintain and 
for which there is abundant American precedent. 

It is devoutly to be hoped that it will not be neces- 
sary to put armed force anywhere into action. The 
22 



ARMED NEUTRALITY 

American people do not desire it and our desire is not 
different from theirs. I am sure that they will under- 
stand the spirit in which I am now acting, the purpose 
I hold nearest my heart and would wish to exhibit 
in everything I do. I am anxious that the people of 
the nations at war also should understand and not 
mistrust us. I hope that I need give no further 
proofs and assurances than I have already given 
throughout nearly three years of anxious patience 
that I am the friend of peace and mean to preserve it 
for America so long as I am able. 

I am not now proposing or contemplating war or 
any steps that need lead to it. I merely request 
that you will accord me by your own vote and definite 
bestowal the means and the authority to safeguard in 
practice the right of a great people who are at peace 
and who are desirous of exercising none but the rights 
of peace to follow the pursuits of peace in quietness 
and good will — rights recognized time out of mind by 
all the civilized nations of the world. No course of 
my choosing or of theirs will lead to war. War can 
come only by the willful acts and aggressions of others. 

You will understand why I can make no definite 
proposals or forecasts of action now, and must ask 
for your supporting authority in the most general 
terms. The form in which action may become neces- 
sary cannot yet be foreseen. I believe that the 
people will be willing to trust me to act with restraint, 
with prudence, and in the true spirit of amity and 
good faith that they have themselves displayed 
throughout these trying months, and it is in that belief 
that I request that you will authorize me to supply 

23 



WAR ADDRESSES OF WOODROW WILSON 

our merchant ships with defensive arms should that 
become necessary, and with the means of using them, 
and to employ any other instrumentalities or methods 
that may be necessary and adequate to protect our 
ships and our people in their legitimate and peaceful 
pursuits on the seas. 

I request also that you will grant me, at the same 
time, along with the powers I ask, a sufficient credit 
to enable me to provide adequate means of protection 
where they are lacking, including adequate insurance 
against the present war risks. 

I have spoken of our commerce and of the legitimate 
errands of our people on the seas, but you will not 
be misled as to my main thought, the thought that 
lies beneath these phrases and gives them dignity and 
weight. It is not of material interest merely that we 
are thinking. It is, rather, of fundamental human 
rights, chief of all the right of life itself. I am think- 
ing not only of the rights of Americans to go and come 
about their proper business by way of the sea, but 
also of something much deeper, much more funda- 
mental than that. I am thinking of those rights of 
humanity without which there is no civilization. 4 

My theme is of those great principles of compassion 
and of protection which mankind has sought to throw 
about human lives, the lives of noncombatants, 
the lives of men who are peacefully at work keeping the 
industrial processes of the world quick and vital, the 
lives of women and children and of those who supply 
the labor which ministers to their sustenance. 

We are speaking of no selfish material rights, but of 
rights which our hearts support and whose foundation 
24 



ARMED NEUTRALITY 

is that righteous passion for justice upon which all law, 
all structures alike of family, of state, and of mankind, 
must rest, as upon the ultimate base of our existence 
and our liberty. I cannot imagine any man with 
American principles at his heart hesitating to defend 
these things. 



25 



SECOND INAUGURAL ADDRESS 

Delivered at the Inaugural Exercises held on 
March 5, 191 7 

My Fellow Citizens : 

The four years which have elapsed since last I 
stood in this place have been crowded with counsel 
and action of the most vital interest and consequence. 
Perhaps no equal period in our history has been 
so fruitful of important reforms in our economic and 
industrial life or so full of significant changes in the 
spirit and purpose of our political action. We have 
sought very thoughtfully to set our house in order, 
correct the grosser errors and abuses of our industrial 
life, liberate and quicken the processes of our national 
genius and energy, and lift our politics to a broader 
view of the people's essential interests. It is a 
record of singular variety and singular distinction. 1 
But I shall not attempt to review it. It speaks for 
itself and will be of increasing influence as the years 
go by. This is not the time for retrospect. It is 
time, rather, to speak our thoughts and purposes 
concerning the present and the immediate future. 

Although we have centered counsel and action with 
such unusual concentration and success upon the great 
problems of domestic legislation to which we addressed 
26 



SECOND INAUGURAL ADDRESS 

ourselves four years ago, other matters have more 
and more forced themselves upon our attention, 
matters lying outside our own life as a nation and 
over which we had no control, but which, despite our 
wish to keep free of them, have drawn us more and 
more irresistibly into their own current and influence. 

It has been impossible to avoid them. They have 
affected the life of the whole world. They have 
shaken men everywhere with a passion and an 
apprehension they never knew before. It has been 
hard to preserve calm counsel while the thought of 
our own people swayed this way and that under their 
influence. We are a composite and cosmopolitan 
people. 2 We are of the blood of all the nations that 
are at war. The currents of our thoughts as well 
as the currents of our trade run quick at all seasons 
back and forth between us and them. The war 
inevitably set its mark from the first alike upon our 
minds, our industries, our commerce, our politics, 
and our social action. To be indifferent to it or 
independent of it was out of the question. 

And yet all the while we have been conscious that 
we were not part of it. In that consciousness, despite 
many divisions, we have drawn closer together. We 
have been deeply wronged upon the seas, but we have 
not wished to wrong or injure in return ; have retained 
throughout the consciousness of standing in some 
sort apart, intent upon an interest that transcended 
the immediate issues of the war itself. As some of 
the injuries done us have become intolerable we 
have still been clear that we wished nothing for our- 
selves that we were not ready to demand for all 

27 



WAR ADDRESSES OF WOODROW WILSON 

mankind — fair dealing, justice, the freedom to live 
and be at ease against organized wrong. 

It is in this spirit and with this thought that we have 
grown more and more aware, more and more certain 
that the part we wished to play was the part of those 
who mean to vindicate and fortify peace. We have 
been obliged to arm ourselves to make good our claim 
to a certain minimum of right and of freedom of 
action. We stand firm in armed neutrality, since 
it seems that in no other way can we demonstrate 
what it is we insist upon and cannot forego. We 
may even be drawn on, by circumstances, not by 
our own purpose and desire, to a more active assertion 
of our rights as we see them and a more immediate 
association with the great struggle itself. But noth- 
ing will alter our thought or our purpose. They are 
too clear to be obscured. They are too deeply 
rooted in the principles of our national life to be 
altered. We desire neither conquest nor advantage. 3 
We wish nothing that can be had only at the cost of 
another people. We have always professed unselfish 
purpose and we covet the opportunity to prove that 
our professions are sincere. 

There are many things still to do at home to clarify 
our own politics and give new vitality to the industrial 
processes of our own life, and we shall do them as time 
and opportunity serve ; but we realize that the 
greatest things that remain to be done must be done 
with the whole world for stage and in cooperation 
with the wide and universal forces of mankind, and 
we are making our spirits ready for those things. 
They will follow in the immediate wake of the war 

2% 



SECOND INAUGURAL ADDRESS 

itself and will set civilization up again. We are 
provincials no longer. The tragical events of the 
thirty months of vital turmoil through which we have 
just passed have made us citizens of the world. 4 
There can be no turning back. Our own fortunes 
as a nation are involved, whether we would have it 
so or not. 

And yet we are not the less Americans on that 
account. We shall be the more American if we but 
remain true to the principles in which we have been 
bred. They are not the principles of a province or 
of a single continent. We have known and boasted 
all along that they were the principles of a liberated 
mankind. These, therefore, are the things we 
shall stand for, whether in war or in peace : 5 

That all nations are equally interested in the peace 
of the world and in the political stability of free 
peoples, and equally responsible for their maintenance ; 

That the essential principle of peace is the actual 
equality of nations in all matters of right or privilege ; 

That peace cannot securely or justly rest upon an 
armed balance of power ; 

That Governments derive all their just powers 
from the consent of the governed and that no other 
powers should be supported by the common thought, 
purpose, or power of the family of nations; 

That the seas should be equally free and safe for 
the use of all peoples, under rules set up by common 
agreement and consent, and that, so far as practicable, 
they should be accessible to all upon equal terms ; 

That national armaments should be limited to 
the necessities of national order and domestic safety; 

29 



WAR ADDRESSES OF WOODROW WILSON 

That the community of interest and of power upon 
which peace must henceforth depend imposes upon 
each nation the duty of seeing to it that all influences 
proceeding from its own citizens meant to encourage or 
assist revolution in other states should be sternly and 
effectually suppressed and prevented. 

I need not argue these principles to you, my fellow 
countrymen; they are your own, part and parcel of 
your own thinking and your own motive in affairs. 
They spring up native amongst us. Upon this as a 
platform of purpose and of action we can stand 
together. 

And it is imperative that we should stand together. 
We are being forged into a new unity amidst the fires 
that now blaze throughout the world. In their 
ardent heat we shall, in God's providence, let us hope, 
be purged of faction and division, purified of the 
errant humors of party and of private interest, and 
shall stand forth in the days to come with a new 
dignity of national pride and spirit. Let each man 
see to it that the dedication is in his own heart, the 
high purpose of the nation in his own mind, ruler of 
his own will and desire. 6 

I stand here and have taken the high and solemn 
oath 7 to which you have been audience because the 
people of the United States have chosen me for this 
august delegation of power and have by their gracious 
judgment named me their leader in affairs. I know 
now what the task means. I realize to the full the 
responsibility which it involves. I pray God I may 
be given the wisdom and the prudence to do my duty 
in the true spirit of this great people. I am their 
30 



SECOND INAUGURAL ADDRESS 

servant and can succeed only as they sustain and 
guide me by their confidence and their counsel. The 
thing I shall count upon, the thing without which 
neither counsel nor action will avail, is the unity of 
America — and America united in feeling, in purpose, 
and in its vision of duty, of opportunity, and of 
service. We are to beware of all men who would 
turn the tasks and the necessities of the nation to 
their own private profit or use them for the building 
up of private power ; beware that no faction or 
disloyal intrigue break the harmony or embarrass 
the spirit of our people ; beware that our Government 
be kept pure and incorrupt in all its parts. United 
alike in the conception of our duty and in the high 
resolve to perform it in the face of all men, let us 
dedicate ourselves to the great task to which we 
must now set our hand. 8 For myself I beg your 
tolerance, your countenance, and your united aid. 
The shadows that now lie dark upon our path will 
soon be dispelled and we shall walk with the light all 
about us if we be but true to ourselves — to ourselves 
as we have wished to be known in the counsels of the 
world and in the thought of all those who love liberty 
and justice and the right exalted. 



3i 



AT WAR WITH GERMANY 

Address to Congress, April 2, 191 7 

Gentlemen of the Congress: 

I have called the Congress into extraordinary session 
because there are serious — very serious — choices 
of policy to be made, and made immediately, which 
it was neither right nor constitutionally permissible 1 
that I should assume the responsibility of making. 

On the 3d of February last I officially laid before 
you the extraordinary announcement of the Imperial 
German Government that on and after the first day 
of February it was its purpose to put aside all re- 
straints of law or of humanity and use its submarines 
to sink every vessel that sought to approach either 
the ports of Great Britain and Ireland or the western 
coasts of Europe, or any of the ports controlled by 
the enemies of Germany within the Mediterranean. 

That had seemed to be the object of the German 
submarine warfare earlier in the war, but since April 
of last year the Imperial German Government had 
somewhat restrained the commanders of its undersea 
craft in conformity with its promise then given to us 
that passenger boats should not be sunk and that due 
warning would be given to all other vessels which its 
submarines might seek to destroy, when no resistance 
32 



AT WAR WITH GERMANY 

was offered or escape attempted, and care taken that 
their crews were given at least a fair chance to save 
their lives in their open boats. 2 

The precautions taken were meager and haphazard 
enough, as was proved in distressing instance after 
instance in the progress of the cruel and unmanly 
business, but a certain degree of restraint was observed. 

The new policy has swept every restriction aside. 
Vessels of every kind, whatever their flag, their char- 
acter, their cargo, their destination, their errand, have 
been ruthlessly sent to the bottom without warning 
and without thought of help or mercy for those on 
board, the vessels of friendly neutrals along with 
those of belligerents. 

Even hospital ships and ships carrying relief to 
the sorely bereaved and stricken people of Belgium, 
though the latter were provided with safe conduct 
through the prescribed areas by the German Govern- 
ment itself and were distinguished by unmistakable 
marks of identity, have been sunk with the same 
reckless lack of compassion or of principle. 

International law had its origin in the attempt to 
set up some law, which would be respected and 
observed upon the seas, where no nation had right of 
dominion and where lay the free highways of the world. 

By painful stage after stage has that law been 
built up, with meager enough results, indeed, after 
all was accomplished that could be accomplished, 
but always with a clear view, at least, of what the 
heart and conscience of mankind demanded. 

This minimum of right 3 the German Government 
has swept aside under the plea of retaliation and 

33 



WAR ADDRESSES OF WOODROW WILSON 

necessity, and because it had no weapons which it 
could use at sea except these, which it is impossible 
to employ, as it is employing them, without throwing 
to the winds all scruples of humanity or of respect for 
the understandings that were supposed to underlie 
the intercourse of the world. 

I am not now thinking of the loss of property in- 
volved, immense and serious as that is, but only of 
the wanton and wholesale destruction of the lives 
of noncombatants — men, women, and children — 
engaged in pursuits which have always, even in the 
darkest periods of modern history, been deemed 
innocent and legitimate. Property can be paid 
for; the lives of peaceful and innocent people 
cannot be. 4 

The present German warfare against commerce 
is a warfare against mankind. It is a war against 
all nations. American ships have been sunk, Amer- 
ican lives taken, in ways which it has stirred us very 
deeply to learn of ; but the ships and people of other 
neutral and friendly nations have been sunk and over- 
whelmed in the waters in the same way. 

There has been no discrimination. The challenge 
is to all mankind. Each nation must decide for 
itself how it will meet it. The choice we make for 
ourselves must be made with a moderation of counsel 
and a temperateness of judgment befitting our char- 
acter and our motives as a nation. We must put 
excited feeling away. Our motive will not be revenge 
or the victorious assertion of the physical might of 
the nation, but only the vindication of right, of human 
right, of which we are only a single champion. 
34 



AT WAR WITH GERMANY 

When I addressed the Congress on the 26th 
of February last I thought that it would suffice 
to assert our neutral rights with arms, our right 
to use the seas against unlawful interference, our 
right to keep our people safe against unlawful 
violence. 

But armed neutrality, it now appears, is im- 
practicable. Because submarines have been used 
against merchant shipping, it is impossible to defend 
ships against their attacks, as the law of nations has 
assumed that merchantmen would defend themselves 
against privateers or cruisers, visible craft, giving 
chase upon the open sea. 

It is common prudence in such circumstances, grim 
necessity indeed, to destroy them before they have 
shown their own intention. They must be dealt with 
upon sight, if dealt with at all. 

The German Government denies the right of 
neutrals to use arms at all within the areas of the 
sea which it has prohibited, even in the defense of 
rights which no modern publicist has ever before 
questioned their right to defend. 

The intimation is conveyed that the armed guards 
which we have placed on our merchant ships will be 
treated as beyond the pale of law and subject to be 
dealt with as pirates would be. Armed neutrality 
is ineffectual enough at best. In such circumstances 
and in the face of such pretensions it is worse than 
ineffectual. It is likely only to produce what it 
was meant to prevent. It is practically certain to 
draw us into the war without either the rights or the 
effectiveness of belligerents. 

35 



WAR ADDRESSES OF WOODROW WILSON 

There is one choice we cannot make, we are in- 
capable of making : We will not choose the path of 
submission and suffer the most sacred rights of our 
nation and our people to be ignored or violated. The 
wrongs against which we now array ourselves are not 
common wrongs; they cut to the very roots of 
human life. 

With a profound sense of the solemn and even 
tragical character of the step I am taking and of the 
grave responsibilities which it involves, but in un- 
hesitating obedience to what I deem my constitutional 
duty, I advise that the Congress declare the recent 
course of the Imperial German Government to be in 
fact nothing less than war against the Government 
and people of the United States; that it formally 
accept the status of belligerent which has thus been 
thrust upon it; and that it take immediate steps 
not only to put the country in a more thorough 
state of defense but also to exert all its power 
and employ all its resources to bring the Govern- 
ment of the German Empire to terms and end 
the war. 

What this will involve is clear. It will involve the 
utmost practicable cooperation in counsel and action 
with the Governments now at war with Germany, 
and, as incident to that, the extension to those Govern- 
ments of the most liberal financial credits, in order 
that our resources may, so far as possible, be added 
to theirs. It will involve the organization and 
mobilization of all the material resources of the 
country to supply the materials of war and serve 
the incidental needs of the nation in the most 
36 



AT WAR WITH GERMANY 

abundant, and yet the most economical and efficient, 
way possible. 

It will involve the immediate full equipment of 
the navy in all respects, but particularly in supply- 
ing it with the best means of dealing with the enemy's 
submarines. It will involve the immediate addition 
to the armed forces of the United States, already pro- 
vided for by law in case of war, of at least 500,000 
men, who should, in my opinion, be chosen upon the 
principle of universal liability to service, and also 
the authorization of subsequent additional increments 
of equal force so soon as they may be needed and can 
be handled in training. 

It will involve also, of course, the granting of 
adequate credits to the Government, sustained, I 
hope, so far as they can equitably be sustained by the 
present generation, by well-conceived taxation. I 
say sustained so far as may be equitable by taxation 
because it seems to me that it would be most unwise 
to base the credits which will now be necessary entirely 
on money borrowed. It is our duty, I most respect- 
fully urge, to protect our people so far as we may 
against the very serious hardships and evils which 
would be likely to arise out of the inflation which 
would be produced by vast loans. 

In carrying out the measures by which these things 
are to be accomplished we should keep constantly in 
mind the wisdom of interfering as little as possible 
in our own preparation and in the equipment of our 
own military forces with the duty — for it will be a 
very practical duty — of supplying the nations already 
at war with Germany with the materials which they 

37 ' 



WAR ADDRESSES OF WOODROW WILSON 

can obtain only from us or by our assistance. They 
are in the field and we should help them in every way 
to be effective there. 

I shall take the liberty of suggesting, through the 
several executive departments of the Government 
for the consideration of your committees, measures for 
the accomplishment of the several objects I have 
mentioned. I hope that it will be your pleasure to 
deal with them as having been framed after very 
careful thought by the branch of the Government 
upon which the responsibility of conducting the war 
and safeguarding the nation will most directly fall. 

While we do these things, these deeply momentous 
things, let us be very clear, and make very clear to 
all the world what our motives and our objects are. 
My own thought has not been driven from its habitual 
and normal course by the unhappy events of the last 
two months, and I do not believe that the thought of 
the nation has been altered or clouded by them. 

I have exactly the same thing in mind now that I 
had in mind when I addressed the Senate on the 2 2d 
of January last ; the same that I had in mind when I 
addressed the Congress on the 3d of February and on the 
26th of February. Our object now, as then, is to 
vindicate the principles of peace and justice in the 
life of the world as against selfish and autocratic 
power and to set up amongst the really free and self- 
governed peoples of the world such a concert of pur- 
pose and of action as will henceforth insure the 
observance of those principles. 

Neutrality is no longer feasible or desirable where 
the peace of the world is involved and the freedom 
38 



AT WAR WITH GERMANY 

of its peoples, and the menace to that peace and 
freedom lies in the existence of autocratic Govern- 
ments backed by organized force, which is controlled 
wholly by their will, not by the will of their people. 
We have seen the last of neutrality in such cir- 
cumstances. 

We are at the beginning of an age in which it will 
be insisted that the same standards of conduct and of 
responsibility for wrong done shall be observed among 
nations and their Governments that are observed 
among the individual citizens of civilized states. 5 

We have no quarrel with the German people. We 
have no feeling toward them but one of sympathy 
and friendship. It was not upon their impulse that 
their Government acted in entering this war. It was 
not with their previous knowledge or approval. 6 

It was a war determined upon as wars used to be 
determined upon in the old, unhappy days when 
peoples were nowhere consulted by their rulers and 
wars were provoked and waged in the interest of 
dynasties or of little groups of ambitious men who 
were accustomed to use their fellow men as pawns 
and tools. 

Self-governed nations do not fill their neighbor 
states with spies nor set the course of intrigue to bring 
about some critical posture of affairs which will give 
them an opportunity to strike and make conquest. 
Such designs can be successfully worked only under 
cover and where no one has the right to ask questions. 

Cunningly contrived plans of deception or aggres- 
sion, carried, it may be, from generation to generation, 
can be worked out and kept from the light only 

39 



WAR ADDRESSES OF WOODROW WILSON 

within the privacy of courts or behind the carefully 
guarded confidences of a narrow and privileged class. 
They are happily impossible where public opinion 
commands and insists upon full information con- 
cerning all the nation's affairs. 

A steadfast concert for peace can never be main- 
tained except by a partnership of democratic nations. 
No autocratic government could be trusted to keep 
faith within it or observe its covenants. It must be a 
league of honor, a partnership of opinion. Intrigue 
would eat its vitals away, the plottings of inner circles 
would be a corruption seated at its very heart. Only 
free peoples who could plan what they would and 
render account to no one can hold their purpose 
and their honor steady to a common end and prefer 
the interests of mankind to any narrow interest of 
their own. 

Does not every American feel that assurance has 
been added to our hope for the future peace of the 
world by the wonderful and heartening things that 
have been happening within the last few weeks in 
Russia ? 7 

Russia was known by those who knew it best to 
have been always in fact democratic at heart, in all 
the vital habits of her thought, in all the intimate 
relationships of her people that spoke their natural 
instinct, their habitual attitude toward life. 

Autocracy that crowned the summit of her po- 
litical structure, long as it has stood and terrible 
as was the reality of its power, was not in fact Russian 
in origin, in character, or purpose, and now it has been 
shaken and the great, generous Russian people have 
40 



AT WAR WITH GERMANY 

been added in all their native majesty and might 
to the forces that are righting for freedom in the 
world, for justice, and for peace. 

Here is a fit partner for a league of honor. 

One of the things that has served to convince us 
that the Prussian autocracy was not and could never 
be our friend is that from the very outset of the pres- 
ent war it has filled our unsuspecting communities 
and even our offices of government with spies and 
set criminal intrigues everywhere afoot against our 
national unity of council, our peace within and 
without, our industries and our commerce. 

Indeed, it is now evident that its spies were here 
even before the war began, and it is unhappily not a 
matter of conjecture but a fact proved in our courts 
of justice that the intrigues which have more than 
once come perilously near to disturbing the peace 
and dislocating the industries of the country have 
been carried on at the instigation, with the support, 
and even under the personal direction of official 
agents of the Imperial Government accredited to the 
Government of the United States. 8 

Even in checking these things and trying to 
extirpate them we have sought to put the most 
generous interpretation possible upon them because 
we knew that their source lay, not in any hostile 
feeling or purpose of the German people toward us 
(who were, no doubt, as ignorant of them as we our- 
selves were) but only in the selfish designs of a Govern- 
ment that did what it pleased and told its people 
nothing. But they have played their part in serving 
to convince us at last that that Government entertains 

4i 



WAR ADDRESSES OF WOODROW WILSON 

no real friendship for us and means to act against our 
peace and security at its convenience. That it 
means to stir up enemies against us at our very 
doors the intercepted note to the German Minister 
at Mexico City is eloquent evidence. 9 

We are accepting this challenge of hostile purpose 
because we know that in such a Government, follow- 
ing such methods, we can never have a friend ; and 
that in the presence of its organized power, always 
lying in wait to accomplish we know not what pur- 
pose, there can be no assured security for the demo- 
cratic Governments of the world. 

We are now about to accept gauge of battle with 
this natural foe to liberty, and shall, if necessary, 
spend the whole force of the nation to check and nullify 
its pretensions and its power. We are glad, now that 
we see the facts with no veil of false pretense about 
them, to fight thus for the ultimate peace of the 
world and for the liberation of its peoples — the Ger- 
man people included — for the rights of nations great 
and small and the privilege of men everywhere to 
choose their way of life and of obedience. 

The world must be made safe for democracy. Its 
peace must be planted upon the trusted foundations 
of political liberty. 

We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no 
conquest, no dominion. We seek no indemnities for 
ourselves, no material compensation for the sacrifices 
we shall freely make. We are but one of the cham- 
pions of the rights of mankind. We shall be satisfied 
when those rights have been made as secure as the 
faith and the freedom of the nation can make them. 
42 



AT WAR WITH GERMANY 

Just because we fight without rancor and without 
selfish objects, seeking nothing for ourselves but what 
we shall wish to share with all free peoples, we shall, 
I feel confident, conduct our operations as belligerents 
without passion and ourselves observe with proud 
punctilio the principles of right and of fair play we 
profess to be fighting for. 

I have said nothing of the Governments allied with 
the Imperial Government of Germany because they 
have not made war upon us or challenged us to defend 
our right and our honor. 

The Austro-Hungarian Government has, indeed, 
avowed its unqualified indorsement and acceptance 
of the reckless and lawless submarine warfare adopted 
now without disguise by the Imperial German Gov- 
ernment, and it has therefore not been possible for 
this Government to receive Count Tarnowski, the 
Ambassador recently accredited to this Government 
by the Imperial and Royal Government of Austria- 
Hungary; but that Government has not actually 
engaged in warfare against citizens of the United 
States on the seas, and I take the liberty, for the 
present at least, of postponing a discussion of our 
relations with the authorities at Vienna. 

We enter this war only where we are clearly forced 
into it because there are no other means of defending 
our rights. 

It will be all the easier for us to conduct ourselves 
as belligerents in a high spirit of right and fairness 
because we act without animus, not in enmity toward 
a people or with the desire to bring any injury or dis- 
advantage upon them, but only in armed opposition 

43 



WAR ADDRESSES OF WOODROW WILSON 

to an irresponsible government which has thrown aside 
all considerations of humanity and of right and is 
running amuck. 

We are, let me say again, the sincere friends of the 
German people, and shall desire nothing so much as 
the early reestablishment of intimate relations of 
mutual advantage between us -— however hard it 
may be for them, for the time being, to believe that 
this is spoken from our hearts. 

We have borne with their present Government 
through all these bitter months because of that friend- 
ship — exercising a patience and forbearance which 
would otherwise have been impossible. We shall, 
happily, still have an opportunity to prove that 
friendship in our daily attitude and actions toward 
the millions of men and women of German birth and 
native sympathy who live amongst us and share our 
life, and we shall be proud to prove it toward all 
who are in fact loyal to their neighbors and to the 
Government in the hour of test. They are, most of 
them, as true and loyal Americans as if they had 
never known any other fealty or allegiance. They 
will be prompt to stand with us in rebuking and re- 
straining the few who may be of a different mind 
and purpose. 

If there should be disloyalty, it will be dealt with 
with a firm hand of stern repression ; but if it lif ts 
its head at all, it will lift it only here and there and 
without countenance except from a lawless and malig- 
nant few. 

It is a distressing and oppressive duty, gentlemen 
of the Congress, which I have performed in thus 
44 



AT WAR WITH GERMANY 

addressing you. There are, it may be, many months 
of fiery trial and sacrifice ahead of us. It is a fearful 
thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, into 
the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civiliza- 
tion itself seeming to be in the balance. But the right 
is more precious than peace, 10 and we shall fight for 
the things which we have always carried nearest our 
hearts — for democracy, for the right of those who 
submit to authority to have a voice in their own 
governments, for the rights and liberties of small 
nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a 
concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety 
to all nations and make the world itself at last free. 

To such a task we can dedicate our lives and our 
fortunes, everything that we are and everything that 
we have, with the pride of those who know that the 
day has come when America is privileged to spend 
her blood and her might for the principles that gave 
her birth and happiness and the peace which she has 
treasured. God helping her, she can do no other. 



45 



The Declaration 
of JVar 

Whereas, The Imperial German Govern- 
ment has committed repeated acts of war 
against the Government and the people of 
the United States of America; therefore, 
be it 

Resolved, by the Senate and House of 
Representatives of the United States of 
America in Congress assembled, That the 
state of war between the United States and 
the Imperial German Government, which 
has thus been thrust upon the United States, 
is hereby formally declared; and 

That the President be, and he is hereby, 
authorized and directed to employ the entire 
naval and military forces of the United 
States and the resources of the Government 
to carry on war against the Imperial German 
Government; and to bring the conflict to 
a successful termination all the resources 
of the country are hereby pledged by the 
Congress of the United States. 



WHAT WE ARE FIGHTING FOR 

Message to the Pro visional Government of Russia, 
May 26, 1917 

In view of the approaching visit of the American 
delegation to Russia to express the deep friendship 
of the American people for the people of Russia and 
to discuss the best and most practical means of co- 
operation between the two peoples in carrying the 
present struggle for the freedom of all peoples to a 
successful consummation, it seems opportune and ap- 
propriate that I should state again, in the light of 
this new partnership, the objects the United States 
has had in mind in entering the war. Those objects 
have been very much beclouded during the past few 
weeks by mistaken and misleading statements, and 
the issues at stake are too momentous, too tremendous, 
too significant for the whole human race to permit 
any misinterpretations or misunderstandings, how- 
ever slight, to remain uncorrected for a moment. 

The war has begun to go against Germany, and in 
their desperate desire to escape the inevitable ulti- 
mate defeat those who are in authority in Germany 
are using every possible instrumentality, are mak- 
ing use even of the influence of groups and parties 
among their own subjects to whom they have 
never been just or fair or even tolerant, to promote 

47 



WAR ADDRESSES OF WOODROW WILSON 

a propaganda on both sides of the sea which will 
preserve for them their influence at home and their 
power abroad, to the undoing of the very men they 
are using. 

The position of America in this war is so clearly 
avowed that no man can be excused for mistaking it. 
She seeks no material profit or aggrandizement of 
any kind. She is fighting for no advantage or selfish 
object of her own, but for the liberation of peoples 
everywhere from the aggressions of autocratic force. 
The ruling classes in Germany have begun of late to 
profess a like liberality and justice of purpose, but 
only to preserve the power they have set up to Ger- 
many and the selfish advantages which they have 
wrongly gained for themselves and their private proj- 
ects of power all the way from Berlin to Bagdad and 
beyond. Government after government has by their 
influence, without open conquest of its territory, been 
linked together in a net of intrigue directed against 
nothing less than the peace and liberty of the world. 
The meshes of that intrigue must be broken, but can- 
not be broken unless wrongs already done are undone ; 
and adequate measures must be taken to prevent it 
from ever again being rewoven or repaired. 

Of course, the Imperial German Government and 
those whom it is using for their own undoing are seek- 
ing to obtain pledges that the war will end in the 
restoration of the status quo ante. It was the status 
quo ante out of which this iniquitous war issued forth, 
the power of the Imperial German Government within 
the Empire and its widespread domination and in- 
fluence outside of that Empire. That status must be 
48 



WHAT WE ARE FIGHTING FOR 

altered in such fashion as to prevent any such hideous 
thing from ever happening again. 

We are righting for the liberty, the self-government, 
and the undictated development of all peoples, and 
every feature of the settlement that concludes this 
war must be conceived and executed for that purpose. 
Wrongs must first be righted, and then adequate safe- 
guards must be created to prevent their being com- 
mitted again. We ought not to consider remedies 
merely because they have a pleasing and sonorous 
sound. Practical questions can be settled only by 
practical means. Phrases will not accomplish the 
result. Effective readjustments will ; and whatever 
readjustments are necessary must be made. 

But they must follow a principle, and that prin- 
ciple is plain. No people must be forced under sov- 
ereignty under which it does not wish to live. No 
territory must change hands except for the purpose 
of securing those who inhabit it a fair chance of life 
and liberty. No indemnities must be insisted on 
except those that constitute payment for manifest 
wrongs done. No readjustments of power must be 
made except such as will tend to secure the future 
peace of the world and the future welfare and happi- 
ness of its peoples. 1 

And then the free peoples of the world must draw 
together in some common covenant, some genuine 
and practical cooperation that will in effect combine 
their force to secure peace and justice in the dealings 
of nations with one another. The brotherhood of 
mankind must no longer be a fair but empty phrase ; 
it must be given a structure of force and reality. 

49 



WAR ADDRESSES OF WOODROW WILSON 

The nations must realize their common life and effect 
a workable partnership to secure that life against the 
aggressions of autocratic and self-pleasing power. 

For these things we can afford to pour out blood and 
treasure. For these are the things we have always 
professed to desire, and unless we pour out blood and 
treasure now and succeed, we may never be able to 
unite or show conquering force again in the great 
cause of human liberty. The day has come to con- 
quer or submit. If the forces of autocracy can divide 
us they will overcome us : if we stand together, victory 
is certain and the liberty which victory will secure. 
We can afford then to be generous, but we cannot 
afford then or now to be weak or omit any single 
guarantee of justice and security. 



5° 



THE FLAG WE FOLLOW 

President Wilson's Speech on June 14, 1917 

My Fellow Citizens : 

We meet to celebrate Flag Day because this flag 
which we honor, and under which we serve, is the 
emblem of our unity, our power, our thought and 
purpose as a nation. It has no other character than 
that which we give it from generation to generation. 
The choices are ours. It floats in majestic silence 
above the hosts that execute those choices, whether 
in peace or in war. And yet, though silent, it speaks 
to us — speaks to us of the past, of the men and 
women who went before us and of the records they 
wrote upon it. We celebrate the day of its birth, 
and from its birth until now it has witnessed a great 
history, has floated on high the symbol of great events, 
of a great plan of life worked out by a great people. 
We are about to carry it into battle, to lift it where 
it will draw the fire of our enemies. We are about to 
bid thousands, hundreds of thousands, it may be 
millions, of our men, the young, the strong, the ca- 
pable men of the nation, to go forth and die beneath 
it on fields of blood far away — for what ? For some 
unaccustomed thing ? For something for which it has 
never sought before? American armies were never 

5i 



WAR ADDRESSES OF WOODROW WILSON 

before sent across the seas. Why are they sent now ? 
For some new purpose for which this great flag has 
never been carried before or for some old, familiar, 
heroic purpose for which it has seen men, its own men, 
die on every battlefield upon which Americans have 
borne arms since the Revolution? 

These are questions which must be answered. We 
are Americans. We in our turn serve America, and 
can serve her with no private purpose. We must 
use her flag as she has always used it. We are ac- 
countable at the bar of history and must plead in 
utter frankness what purpose it is we seek to serve. 

It is plain enough how we were forced into the war. 
The extraordinary insults and aggressions of the Im- 
perial German Government left us no self-respecting 
choice but to take up arms in defense of our rights as 
a free people and of our honor as a sovereign Govern- 
ment. The military masters of Germany denied us 
the right to be neutral. They filled our unsuspecting 
communities with vicious spies and conspirators and 
sought to corrupt the opinion of our people in their 
own behalf. 

When they found that they could not do that their 
agents diligently spread sedition among us and sought 
to draw our own citizens from their allegiance — and 
some of these agents were men connected with the 
official embassy of the German Government itself 
here in our own capital. 1 They sought by violence to 
destroy our industries and arrest our commerce. 
They tried to incite Mexico to take up arms against 
us and to draw Japan into a hostile alliance with 
her — and that, not by indirection but by direct 
52 



THE FLAG WE FOLLOW 

suggestion from the Foreign Office in Berlin. They 
impudently denied us the use of the high seas and 
repeatedly executed their threat that they would send 
to their death any of our people who ventured to ap- 
proach the coasts of Europe. And many of our own 
people were corrupted. Men began to look upon their 
own neighbors with suspicion and to wonder in their 
hot resentment and surprise whether there was any 
community in which hostile intrigue did not lurk. 
What great nation in such circumstances would not 
have taken up arms ? Much as we had desired peace 
it was denied us, and not of our own choice. This 
flag under which we serve would have been dishonored 
had we withheld our hand. 

But that is only part of the story. We know now 
as clearly as we knew before we were ourselves en- 
gaged that we are not the enemies of the German 
people and that they are not our enemies. They did 
not originate or desire this hideous war or wish that 
we should be drawn into it ; and we are vaguely con- 
scious that we are righting their cause, as they will 
some day see it, as well as our own. They are them- 
selves in the grip of the same sinister power that has 
now at last stretched its ugly talons out and drawn 
blood from us. 2 The whole world is at war because 
the whole world is in the grip of that power and is 
trying out the great battle which shall determine 
whether it is to be brought under its mastery or fling 
itself free. 

The war was begun by the military masters of Ger- 
many, who proved to be also the masters of Austria- 
Hungary. 3 These men have never regarded nations 

53 



WAR ADDRESSES OF WOODROW WILSON 

as peoples, men, women, and children of like blood and 
frame as themselves, for whom governments existed 
and in whom governments had their life. They have 
regarded them merely as serviceable organizations 
which they could by force or intrigue bend or cor- 
rupt to their own purpose. They have regarded the 
smaller states in particular and the peoples who could 
be overwhelmed by force as their natural tools and 
instruments of domination. Their purpose has long 
been avowed. The statesmen of other nations, to 
whom that purpose was incredible, paid little atten- 
tion ; regarded what German professors expounded 
in their class rooms, and German writers set forth to 
the world as the goal of German policy, as rather the 
dream of minds detached from practical affairs, as 
preposterous private conceptions of German destiny, 
than as the actual plans of responsible rulers; but 
the rulers of Germany themselves knew all the while 
what concrete plans, what well-advanced intrigues, lay 
back of what the professors and the writers were say- 
ing, and were glad to go forward unmolested, filling 
the thrones of Balkan states with German princes, 4 
putting German officers at the service of Turkey to 
drill her armies and make interest with her Govern- 
ment, developing plans of sedition and rebellion in 
India and Egypt, setting their fires in Persia. The 
demands made by Austria upon Serbia were a mere 
single step in a plan which compassed Europe and 
Asia, from Berlin to Bagdad. They hoped those 
demands might not arouse Europe, but they meant to 
press them whether they did or not, for they thought 
themselves ready for the final issue of arms. 
54 



THE FLAG WE FOLLOW 

Their plan was to throw a broad belt of German 
military power and political control across the very 
center of Europe and beyond the Mediterranean into 
the heart of Asia, and Austria-Hungary was to be as 
much their tool and pawn as Serbia or Bulgaria or 
Turkey or the ponderous states of the East. Austria- 
Hungary, indeed, was to become part of the Central 
German Empire, absorbed and dominated by the same 
forces and influences that had originally cemented 
the German states themselves. The dream had its 
heart at Berlin. It could have had a heart nowhere 
else. It rejected the idea of solidarity of race entirely. 
The choice of peoples played no part in it at all. It 
contemplated binding together racial and political 
units which could be kept together only by force — 
Czechs, Magyars, Croats, Serbs, Rumanians, Turks, 
Armenians — the proud states of Bohemia and Hun- 
gary, the stout little commonwealths of the Balkans, 
the indomitable Turks, the subtle peoples of the East. 
These peoples did not wish to be united. They 
ardently desired to direct their own affairs, and would 
be satisfied only by undisputed independence. They 
could be kept quiet only by the presence or the con- 
stant threat of armed men. They would live under a 
common power only by sheer compulsion and await 
the day of revolution. But the German military 
statesmen had reckoned with all that and were ready 
to deal with it in their own way. 

And they have actually carried the greater part of 
that amazing plan into execution. 5 Look how things 
stand. Austria is at their mercy. It has acted, not 
upon its own initiative or upon the choice of its own 

55 



WAR ADDRESSES OF WOODROW WILSON 

people, but at Berlin's dictation ever since the war 
began. Its people now desire peace, but cannot have 
it until leave is granted from Berlin. The so-called 
Central Powers are in fact but a single Power. Serbia 
is at its mercy, should its hands be but for a moment 
freed. Bulgaria has consented to its will, and Ru- 
mania is overrun. The Turkish armies, which Ger- 
mans trained, are serving Germany, certainly not 
themselves, and the guns of German warships lying 
in the harbor at Constantinople remind Turkish 
statesmen every day that they have no choice but to 
take their orders from Berlin. From Hamburg to 
the Persian Gulf the net is spread. 

Is it not easy to understand the eagerness for peace 
that has been manifested from Berlin ever since the 
snare was set and sprung? Peace, peace, peace has 
been the talk of her Foreign Office for now a year and 
more; not peace upon her own initiative but upon 
the initiative of the nations over which she now deems 
herself to hold the advantage. A little of the talk has 
been public, but most of it has been private. Through 
all sorts of channels it has come to me, and in all sorts 
of guises, but never with the terms disclosed which 
the German Government would be willing to accept. 
That Government has other valuable pawns in its 
hands besides those I have mentioned. It still holds 
a valuable part of France, though with slowly relaxing 
grasp, and practically the whole of Belgium. Its armies 
press close upon Russia and overrun Poland at their 
will. It cannot go further ; it dare not go back. It 
wishes to close its bargain before it is too late and it has 
little left to offer for the pound of flesh it will demand. 
56 



THE FLAG WE FOLLOW 

The military masters under whom Germany is bleed- 
ing see very clearly to what point fate has brought 
them. If they fall back or are forced back an inch, 
their power both abroad and at home will fall to 
pieces like a house of cards. It is their power at home 
they are thinking about now more than their power 
abroad. It is that power which is trembling under 
their very feet, and deep fear has entered their hearts. 
They have but one chance to perpetuate their mili- 
tary power or even their controlling political influence. 
If they can secure peace now with the immense ad- 
vantages still in their hands which they have up to 
this point apparently gained, they will have justified 
themselves before the German people ; they will have 
gained by force what they promised to gain by it, an 
immense expansion of German power, an immense 
enlargement of German industrial and commercial 
opportunities. Their prestige will be secure, and with 
their prestige their political power. If they fail, their 
people will thrust them aside ; a Government account- 
able to the people themselves will be set up in Ger- 
many as it has been in England, in the United States, 
in France, and in all the great countries of the modern 
time except Germany. If they succeed they are safe 
and Germany and the world are undone ; if they fail 
Germany is saved and the world will be at peace. 
If they succeed America will fall within the menace. 
We and all the rest of the world must remain armed 
as they will remain, and must make ready for the 
next step in their aggression; if they fail the 
world may unite for peace and Germany may be 
of the union. 

57 



WAR ADDRESSES OF WOODROW WILSON 

Do you not now understand the new intrigue, the 
intrigue for peace, and why the masters of Germany 
do not hesitate to use any agency that promises to 
effect their purpose, the deceit of the nations? 6 
Their present particular aim is to deceive all those 
who throughout the world stand for the rights of 
peoples and the self-government of nations ; for they 
see what immense strength the forces of justice and of 
liberalism are gathering out of this war. They are 
employing liberals in their enterprise. They are using 
men, in Germany and without, as their spokesmen 
whom they have hitherto despised and oppressed, 
using them for their own destruction — Socialists, 
the leaders of labor, the thinkers they have hitherto 
sought to silence. Let them once succeed and these 
men, now their tools, will be ground to powder beneath 
the weight of the great military empire they will have 
set up ; the revolutionists in Russia will be cut off 
from all succor or cooperation in western Europe and 
a counter revolution fostered and supported ; 7 Ger- 
many herself will lose her chance of freedom, and all 
Europe will arm for the next, the final, struggle. 

The sinister intrigue is being no less actively con- 
ducted in this country than in Russia and in every 
country in Europe to which the agents and dupes of 
the Imperial German Government can get access. 
That Government has many spokesmen here, in places 
high and low. They have learned discretion. They 
keep within the law. It is opinion they utter now, 
not sedition. They proclaim the liberal purposes of 
their masters, declare this a foreign war which can 
touch America with no danger to either her lands or 
58 



THE FLAG WE FOLLOW 

her institutions, set England at the center of the stage 
and talk of her ambition to assert economic dominion 
throughout the world, appeal to our ancient tradition 
of isolation in the politics of the nations and seek to 
undermine the Government with false professions of 
loyalty to its principles. 

But they will make no headway. The false betray 
themselves always in every accent. It is only friends 
and partisans of the German Government whom we 
have already identified who utter these thinly dis- 
guised disloyalties. The facts are patent to all the 
world, and nowhere are they more plainly seen than 
in the United States, where we are accustomed to deal 
with facts and not with sophistries ; and the great fact 
that stands out above all the rest is that this is a 
people's war, a war for freedom and justice and self- 
government among all the nations of the world, a war 
to make the world safe for the peoples who live upon 
it and have made it their own, the German people 
themselves included, and that with us rests the choice 
to break through all these hypocrisies and patent 
cheats and masks of brute force and help set the 
world free, or else stand aside and let it be dominated 
a long age through by sheer weight of arms and the 
arbitrary choices of self-constituted masters, by the 
nation which can maintain the biggest armies and 
the most irresistible armaments — a power to which 
the world has afforded no parallel and in the face of 
which political freedom must wither and perish. 

For us there is but one choice. We have made it. 
Woe be to the man or group of men that seeks to 
stand in our way in this day of high resolution when 

59 



WAR ADDRESSES OF WOODROW WILSON 

every principle we hold dearest is to be vindicated 
and made secure for the salvation of the nations. We 
are ready to plead at the bar of history, and our flag 
shall wear a new luster. Once more we shall make 
good with our lives and fortunes the great faith to 
which we were born, and a new glory shall shine in 
the face of our people. 8 



60 



THE PRESIDENT'S REPLY TO THE POPE 
Washington, D. C, August 27, 191 7 

To His Holiness Benedictus XV, Pope : 

In acknowledgment of the communication of your 
Holiness to the belligerent peoples, dated August 1, 
191 7, the President of the United States requests me 
to transmit the following reply : 

Every heart that has not been blinded and hardened 
by this terrible war must be touched by this moving 
appeal of his Holiness the Pope, must feel the dignity 
and force of the humane and generous motives which 
prompted it, and must fervently wish that we might 
take the path of peace he so persuasively points out. 
But it would be folly to take it if it does not in fact 
lead to the goal he proposes. Our response must be 
based upon the stern facts, and upon nothing else. 
It is not a mere cessation of arms he desires ; it is a 
stable and enduring peace. This agony must not be 
gone through with again, and it must be a matter of 
very sober judgment what will insure us against it. 

His Holiness in substance proposes that we return 
to the status quo ante helium and that then there be a 
general condonation, disarmament, and a concert of 
nations based upon an acceptance of the principle of 

61 



WAR ADDRESSES OF WOODROW WILSON 

arbitration ; that by a similar concert freedom of the 
seas be established ; and that the territorial claims of 
France and Italy, the perplexing problems of the 
Balkan states, and the restitution of Poland be left 
to such conciliatory adjustments as may be possible 
in the new temper of such a peace, due regard being 
paid to the aspirations of the peoples whose political 
fortunes and affiliations will be involved. 

It is manifest that no part of this program can be 
successfully carried out unless the restitution of the 
status quo ante furnishes a firm and satisfactory basis 
for it. The object of this war is to deliver the free 
peoples of the world from the menace and the actual 
power of a vast military establishment controlled by 
an irresponsible government, which, having secretly 
planned to dominate the world, proceeded to carry 
the plan out without regard either to the sacred obli- 
gations of treaty or the long-established practices and 
long-cherished principles of international action and 
honor ; which chose its own time for the war ; de- 
livered its blow fiercely and suddenly ; stopped at no 
barrier, either of law or of mercy; swept a whole 
continent within the tide of blood — not the blood of 
soldiers only, but the blood of innocent women and 
children also and of the helpless poor ; and now stands 
balked, but not defeated, the enemy of four-fifths of 
the world. 

This power is not the German people. It is the ruth- 
less master of the German people. It is no business 
of ours how that great people came under its control 
or submitted with temporary zest to the domination 
of its purpose ; but it is our business to see to it that 
62 



THE PRESIDENT'S REPLY TO THE POPE 

the history of the rest of the world is no longer left 
to its handling. 

To deal with such a power by way of peace upon the 
plan proposed by his Holiness the Pope would, so far 
as we can see, involve a recuperation of its strength 
and a renewal of its policy ; would make it necessary 
to create a permanent hostile combination of nations 
against the German people, who are its instruments ; 
and would result in abandoning the new-born Russia 
to the intrigue, the manifold subtle interference, and 
the certain counter-revolution which would be at- 
tempted by all the malign influences to which the 
German Government has of late accustomed the world. 

Can peace be based upon a restitution of its power 
or upon any word of honor it could pledge in a treaty 
of settlement and accommodation? 

Responsible statesmen must now everywhere see, 
if they never saw before, that no peace can rest se- 
curely upon political or economic restrictions meant 
to benefit some nations and cripple or embarrass 
others, upon vindictive action of any sort, or any 
kind of revenge or deliberate injury. The American 
people have suffered intolerable wrongs at the hands 
of the Imperial German Government, but they desire 
no reprisal upon the German people, who have them- 
selves suffered all things in this war, which they did 
not choose. They believe that peace should rest 
upon the rights of peoples, not the rights of govern- 
ments — the rights of peoples, great or small, weak or 
powerful — their equal right to freedom and security 
and self-government, and to a participation upon fair 
terms in the economic opportunities of the world, the 

63 



WAR ADDRESSES OF WOODROW WILSON 

German people, of course, included, if they will accept 
equality and not seek domination. 

The test, therefore, of every plan of peace is this : 
Is it based upon the faith of all the peoples involved, 
or merely upon the word of an ambitious and intrigu- 
ing Government, on the one hand, and of a group of 
free peoples, on the other ? This is a test which goes 
to the root of the matter; and it is the test which 
must be applied. 

The purposes of the United States in this war are 
known to the whole world — to every people to whom 
the truth has been permitted to come. They do not 
need to be stated again. We seek no material ad- 
vantage of any kind. We believe that the intolerable 
wrongs done in this war by the furious and brutal 
power of the Imperial German Government ought to 
be repaired, but not at the expense of the sovereignty 
of any people — rather a vindication of the sover- 
eignty both of those that are weak and of those that 
are strong. Punitive damages, the dismemberment 
of empires, the establishment of selfish and exclusive 
economic leagues, we deem inexpedient, and in the 
end worse than futile, no proper basis for a peace of 
any kind, least of all for an enduring peace. That 
must be based upon justice and fairness and the 
common rights of mankind. 

We cannot take the word of the present rulers of Ger- 
many as a guarantee of anything that is to endure 
unless explicitly supported by such conclusive evidence 
of the will and purpose of the German people them- 
selves as the other peoples of the world would be 
justified in accepting. Without such guarantees 
64 



THE PRESIDENT'S REPLY TO THE POPE 

treaties of settlement, agreements for disarmament, 
covenants to set up arbitration in the place of force, 
territorial adjustments, reconstitutions of small na- 
tions, if made with the German Government, no 
man, no nation, could now depend on. 
. We must await some new evidence of the purposes 
of the great peoples of the Central Powers. God 
grant it may be given soon and in a way to restore 
the confidence of all peoples everywhere in the faith 
of nations and the possibility of a covenanted peace. 
Robert Lansing 1 

Secretary of State of the 
United States of America 



6S 



THE AMERICAN PEOPLE MUST STAND 
TOGETHER 

Address to American Federation of Labor Convention, 
Buffalo, New York, November 12, 191 7 

I esteem it a great privilege and a real honor to be 
thus admitted to your public counsels. When your 
executive committee paid me the compliment of in- 
viting me here, I gladly accepted the invitation be- 
cause it seems to me that this, above all other times 
in our history, is the time for common counsel, for 
the drawing together not only of the energies but of 
the minds of the nation. I thought that this was a 
welcome opportunity for disclosing to you some of the 
thoughts that have been gathering in my mind during 
the last momentous months. 

I am introduced to you as the President of the 
United States, and yet I would be pleased if you would 
put the thought of office into the background and 
regard me as one of your fellow citizens who has come 
here to speak, not the words of authority, but the 
words of counsel ; the words which men should speak 
to one another who wish to be frank in a moment 
more critical perhaps than the history of the world 
has ever yet known ; a moment when it is every man's 
duty to forget himself, to forget his own interests, to 
rill himself with the nobility of a great national and 
66 



AMERICAN PEOPLE MUST STAND TOGETHER 

world conception, and act upon a new platform ele- 
vated above the ordinary affairs of life and lifted to 
where men have views of the long destiny of man- 
kind. 1 I think that in order to realize just what this 
moment of counsel is, it is very desirable that we 
should remind ourselves just how this war came 
about and just what it is for. You can explain most 
wars very simply, but the explanation of this is not 
so simple. Its roots run deep into all the obscure 
soils of history, and in my view this is the last decisive 
issue between the old principles of power and the new 
principles of freedom. 

The war was started by Germany. Her authori- 
ties deny that they started it, but I am willing to let 
the statement I have just made await the verdict of 
history. And the thing that needs to be explained is 
why Germany started the war. Remember what the 
position of Germany in the world was — as enviable 
a position as any nation has ever occupied. The 
whole world stood at admiration of her wonderful 
intellectual and material achievements. All the intel- 
lectual men of the world went to school to her. As a 
university man, I have been surrounded by men 
trained in Germany, men who had resorted to Ger- 
many because nowhere else could they get such 
thorough and searching training, particularly in the 
principles of science and the principles that underlie 
modern material achievement. Her men of science 
had made her industries perhaps the most competent 
industries of the world, and the label "Made in Ger- 
many" was a guarantee of good workmanship and of 
sound material. She had access to all the markets 

67 



WAR ADDRESSES OF WOODROW WILSON 

of the world, and every other who traded in those 
markets feared Germany because of her effective and 
almost irresistible competition. She had a "place 
in the sun." 2 

Why was she not satisfied? What more did she 
want ? 3 There was nothing in the world of peace 
that she did not already have and have in abundance. 
We boast of the extraordinary pace of American 
advancement. We show with pride the statistics of 
the increase of our industries and the population of 
our cities. Well, those statistics did not match the 
recent statistics of Germany. Her old cities took on 
youth, grew faster than any American cities ever 
grew. Her old industries opened their eyes and saw 
a new world and went out for its conquest. And 
yet the authorities of Germany were not satisfied. 
You have one part of the answer to the question why 
she was not satisfied in her methods of competition. 
There is no important industry in Germany upon 
which the Government has not laid its hands, to direct 
it and, when necessity arose, control it; and you 
have only to ask any man whom you meet who is 
familiar with the conditions that prevailed before the 
war in the matter of national competition to find out 
the methods of competition which the German manu- 
facturers and exporters used under the patronage and 
support of the Government of Germany. You will 
find that they were the same sorts of competition 
that we have tried to prevent by law within our own 
borders. If they could not sell their goods cheaper 
than we could sell ours at a profit to themselves, they 
could get a subsidy from the Government which made 
68 



AMERICAN PEOPLE MUST STAND TOGETHER 

it possible to sell them cheaper anyhow, and the con- 
ditions of competition were thus controlled in large 
measure by the German Government itself. 

But that did not satisfy the German Government. 
All the while there was lying behind its thought in its 
dreams of the future a political control which would 
enable it in the long run to dominate the labor and 
the industry of the world. They were not content 
with success by superior achievement; they wanted 
success by authority. I suppose very few of you 
have thought much about the Berlin-to-Bagdad Rail- 
way. The Berlin-to-Bagdad Railway was constructed 
in order to run the threat of force down the flank of 
the industrial undertakings of half a dozen other 
countries; so that when German competition came 
in, it would not be resisted too far, because there was 
always the possibility of getting German armies into 
the heart of that country quicker than any other 
armies could be got there. 

Look at the map of Europe now ! 4 Germany is 
thrusting upon us again and again the discussion of 
peace. And she talks about what ? Talks about Bel- 
gium; talks about northern France; talks about 
Alsace-Lorraine. Well, those are deeply interesting 
subjects to us and to them, but they are not talking 
about the heart of the matter. Take the map and 
look at it. Germany has absolute control of Austria- 
Hungary, practical control of the Balkan states, 
control of Turkey, control of Asia Minor. I saw a 
map in which the whole thing was printed in appro- 
priate black the other day, and the black stretched 
all the way from Hamburg to Bagdad — the bulk of 

6 9 



WAR ADDRESSES OF WOODROW WILSON 

German power inserted into the heart of the world. 
If she can keep that, she has kept all that her dreams 
contemplated when the war began. If she can keep 
that, her power can disturb the world as long as she 
keeps it, always provided, for I feel bound to put 
this proviso in, always provided the present influences 
that control the German Government continue to 
control it. I believe that the spirit of freedom can 
get into the hearts of Germans and find as fine a wel- 
come there as it can find in any other hearts, but the 
spirit of freedom does not suit the plans of the Pan- 
Germans. 5 Power cannot be used with concentrated 
force against free peoples if it is used by free people. 

You know how many intimations come to us from 
one of the Central Powers 6 that it is more anxious for 
peace than the chief Central Power, and you know 
that it means that the people of that Central Power 
know that if the war ends as it stands, they will in 
effect themselves be vassals of Germany, notwith- 
standing that their populations are compounded of 
all the peoples of that part of the world, and not- 
withstanding the fact that they do not wish in their 
pride and proper spirit of nationality to be so ab- 
sorbed and dominated. Germany is determined that 
the political power of the world shall belong to her. 
There have been such ambitions before. They have 
been in part realized, but never before have those 
ambitions been based upon so exact and precise and 
scientific a plan of domination. 

May I not say that it is amazing to me that any 
group of persons should be so ill-informed as to sup- 
pose, as some groups in Russia apparently suppose, 
70 



AMERICAN PEOPLE MUST STAND TOGETHER 

that any reforms planned in the interest of the people 
can live in the presence of a Germany powerful 
enough to undermine or overthrow them by intrigue 
or force? Any body of free men that compounds 
with the present German Government is compound- 
ing for its own destruction. But that is not the whole 
of the story. Any man in America, or anywhere else, 
who supposes that the free industry and enterprise of 
the world can continue if the Pan- German plan is 
achieved and German power fastened upon the 
world, is as fatuous as the dreamers in Russia. What 
I am opposed to is not the feeling of the pacifists but 
their stupidity. My heart is with them, but my 
mind has a contempt for them. I want peace, but 
I know how to get it, and they do not. 

You will notice that I sent a friend of mine, Colonel 
House, 7 to Europe, who is as great a lover of peace 
as any man in the world, but I did not send him on a 
peace mission. I sent him to take part in a con- 
ference as to how the war was to be won. And he 
knows, as I know, that that is the way to get peace 
if you want it for more than a few minutes. 

All of this is a preface to the conference that I have 
referred to with regard to what we are going to do. 
If we are true friends of freedom — our own or any- 
body else's — we will see that the power of this 
country, the productivity of this country, is raised to 
its absolute maximum, and that absolutely nobody is 
allowed to stand in the way of it. When I say that 
nobody is allowed to stand in the way, I do not mean 
that they shall be prevented by the power of the 
Government but by the power of the American 

7i 



WAR ADDRESSES OF WOODROW WILSON 

spirit. 8 Our duty, if we are to do this great thing 
and show America to be what we believe her to be — 
the greatest hope and energy of the world — is to 
stand together night and day until the job is finished. 

While we are fighting for freedom we must see, 
among other things, that labor is free; and that 
means a number of interesting things. It means not 
only that we must do what we have declared our 
purpose to do, see that the conditions of labor are 
not rendered more onerous by the war, but also that 
we shall see to it that the instrumentalities by which 
the conditions of labor are improved are not blocked 
or checked. That we must do. That has been the 
matter about which I have taken pleasure in con- 
ferring from time to time with your president, Mr. 
Gompers; 9 and if I may be permitted to do so, I 
want to express my admiration of his patriotic cour- 
age, his large vision, and his statesmanlike sense of 
what has to be done. I like to lay my mind along- 
side of a mind that knows how to pull in harness. 
The horses that kick over the traces will have to be 
put in corral. 

Now, to stand together means that nobody must 
interrupt the processes of our energy, if the inter- 
ruption can possibly be avoided without the absolute 
invasion of freedom. To put it concretely, that 
means this : Nobody has a right to stop the processes 
of labor until all the methods of conciliation and 
settlement have been exhausted. And I might as 
well say right here that I am not talking to you 
alone. You sometimes stop the courses of labor, but 
there are others who do the same, and I believe I am 
72 



AMERICAN PEOPLE MUST STAND TOGETHER 

speaking from my own experience not only, but from 
the experience of others, when I say that you are 
reasonable in a larger number of cases than the 
capitalists. I am not saying these things to them 
personally yet, because I have not had a chance ; but 
they have to be said, not in any spirit of criticism, 
but in order to clear the atmosphere and come down 
to business. Everybody on both sides has now got to 
transact business, and a settlement is never impossible 
when both sides want to do the square and right thing. 
Moreover a settlement is hard to avoid when the 
parties can be brought face to face. I can differ 
from a man much more radically when he is not in 
the room than I can when he is in the room, because 
then the awkward thing is, he can come back at me 
and answer what I say. It is always dangerous for 
a man to have the floor entirely to himself. There- 
fore we must insist in every instance that the parties 
come into each other's presence and there discuss the 
issues between them and not separately in places 
which have no communication with each other. I 
always like to remind myself of a delightful saying of 
an Englishman of the past generation, Charles Lamb. 10 
He stuttered a bit, and once when he was with a 
group of friends he spoke very harshly of some man 
who was not present. One of the friends said, 
"Why, Charles, I didn't know that you knew So-and- 
so." "O-o-oh," he said, "I-I d-d-don't; I-I can't 
h-h-hate a m-m-man I-I know." There is a great 
deal of human nature, of very pleasing human nature, 
in the saying. It is hard to hate a man you know. 
I may admit, parenthetically, that there are some 

73 



WAR ADDRESSES OF WOODROW WILSON 

politicians whose methods I do not at all believe in, 
but they are jolly good fellows, and if they only 
would not talk the wrong kind of politics with me, 
I should love to be with them. 

So it is all along the line, in serious matters and 
things less serious. We are all of the same clay and 
spirit and we can get together if we desire to get 
together. Therefore, my counsel to you is this : 
Let us show ourselves Americans by showing that 
we do not want to go off in separate camps or groups 
by ourselves, but that we want to cooperate with all 
other classes and all other groups in the common 
enterprise which is to release the spirits of the world 
from bondage. I would be willing to set that up as 
the final test of an American. That is the meaning 
of democracy. I have been very much distressed, 
my fellow citizens, by some of the things that have 
happened recently. The mob spirit is displaying 
itself here and there in this country. I have no 
sympathy with what some men are saying, but I 
have no sympathy with the men who take their 
punishment into their own hands ; and I want to 
say to every man who does join such a mob that I 
do not recognize him as worthy of the free institu- 
tions of the United States. There are some organiza- 
tions in this country whose object is anarchy and the 
destruction of law, but I would not meet their efforts 
by making myself a partner in destroying the law. I 
despise and hate their purposes as much as any man, 
but I would respect the ancient processes of justice ; 
and I would be too proud not to see them done jus- 
tice, however wrong they are. 
74 



AMERICAN PEOPLE MUST STAND TOGETHER 

So I want to utter my earnest protest against any 
manifestation of the spirit of lawlessness anywhere 
or in any cause. Why, gentlemen, look what it 
means. We claim to be the greatest democratic 
people in the world, and democracy means first of all 
that we can govern ourselves. If our men have not 
self-control, then they are not capable of that great 
thing which we call democratic government. A man 
who takes the law into his own hands is not the right 
man to cooperate in any formation or development 
of law and institutions. And some of the processes 
by which the struggle between capital and labor is 
carried on are processes that come very near to tak- 
ing the law into your own hands. I do not mean 
for a moment to compare them with what I have just 
been speaking of, but I want you to see that they 
are mere gradations in the manifestation of the un- 
willingness to cooperate. The fundamental lesson 
of the whole situation is that we must not only 
take common counsel, but also yield to and obey 
common counsel. Not all of the instrumentalities for 
this are at hand. I am hopeful that in the very 
near future new instrumentalities may be organized 
by which we can see to it that various things 
which are now going on shall not go on. There are 
various processes of the dilution of labor and the 
unnecessary substitution of labor and the bidding in 
distant markets and unfairly upsetting the whole 
competition of labor which ought not to go on — I 
mean now on the part of employers — and we must 
interject into this some instrumentality of coopera- 
tion by which the fair thing will be done all around. 

75 



WAR ADDRESSES OF WOODROW WILSON 

I am hopeful that some such instrumentalities may 
be devised, but whether they are or not, we must use 
those that we have, and upon every occasion where 
it is necessary, have such an instrumentality orig- 
inated upon that occasion. 

So, my fellow citizens, the reason I came away 
from Washington is that I sometimes get lonely down 
there. 11 There are so many people in Washington 
who know things that are not so, and there are so 
few people who know anything about what the people 
of the United States are thinking about. I have to 
come away and get reminded of the rest of the coun- 
try. I have to come away and talk to men who are 
up against the real thing and say to them, "I am 
with you if you are with me." And the only test of 
being with me is not to think about me personally 
at all, but merely to think of me as the expression for 
the time being of the power and dignity and hope of 
the United States. 



76 



NO PEACE WITH AUTOCRACY 

Message to Congress December 4, 191 7 

Gentlemen of the Congress: 

Eight months have elapsed since I last had the 
honor of addressing you. They have been months 
crowded with events of immense and grave significance 
for us. I shall not undertake to detail or even to 
summarize these events. The practical particulars of 
the part we have played in them will be laid before 
you in the reports of the executive departments. 1 
I shall discuss only our present outlook upon these 
vast affairs, our present duties, and the immediate 
means of accomplishing the objects we shall hold 
always in view. 

I shall not go back to debate the causes of the war. 
The intolerable wrongs done and planned against us 
by the sinister masters of Germany have long since 
become too grossly obvious and odious to every true 
American to need to be rehearsed. But I shall ask 
you to consider again and with very grave scrutiny 
our objectives and the measures by which we mean to 
attain them ; for the purpose of discussion here in 
this place is action and our action must move straight 
toward definite ends. Our object is, of course, to win 

77 



WAR ADDRESSES OF WOODROW WILSON 

the war, and we shall not slacken or suffer ourselves to 
be diverted until it is won. But it is worth while 
asking and answering the question, When shall we 
consider the war won? 

From one point of view it is not necessary to broach 
this fundamental matter. I do not doubt that the 
American people know what the war is about and what 
sort of an outcome they will regard as a realization 
of their purpose in it. As a nation we are united in 
spirit and intention. 

I pay little heed to those who tell me otherwise. 
I hear the voices of dissent — who does not ? I hear 
the criticism and the clamor of the noisily thoughtless 
and troublesome. I also see men here and there fling 
themselves in impotent disloyalty against the calm, 
indomitable power of the nation. I hear men debate 
peace who understand neither its nature nor the 
way in which we may attain it, with uplifted eyes and 
unbroken spirits. But I know that none of these 
speaks for the nation. They do not touch the heart 
of anything. They may safely be left to strut about 
their uneasy hour and be forgotten. 

But from another point of view I believe that it is 
necessary to say plainly what we here at the seat of 
action consider the war to be for and what part we 
mean to play in the settlement of its searching issues. 
We are the spokesmen 2 of the American people and 
they have a right to know whether their purpose is 
ours. They desire peace by the overcoming of evil, 
by the defeat once and for all of the sinister forces 
that interrupt peace and render it impossible, and 
they wish to know how closely our thought runs with 
78 



NO PEACE WITH AUTOCRACY 

theirs and what action we propose. They are im- 
patient with those who desire peace by any sort of 
compromise — deeply and indignantly impatient — 
but they will be equally impatient with us if we do 
not make it plain to them what our objectives are 
and what we are planning for in seeking to make 
conquest of peace by arms. 

I believe that I speak for them when I say two 
things : First, that this intolerable Thing of which the 
masters of Germany have shown us the ugly face, this 
menace of combined intrigue and force, which we now 
see so clearly as the German power, a Thing without 
conscience or honor or capacity for covenanted peace, 
must be crushed, and if it be not utterly brought to an 
end, at least shut out from the friendly intercourse of 
the nations; and, second, that when this Thing and 
its power are indeed defeated and the time comes that 
we can discuss peace — when the German people have 
spokesmen whose word we can believe. , 3 and when those 
spokesmen are ready in the name of their people to 
accept the common judgment of the nations as to what 
shall henceforth be the bases of law and of covenant for 
the life of the world — we shall be willing and glad to 
pay the full price for peace, and pay it ungrudgingly. 
We know what that price will be. It will be full, 
impartial justice — justice done at every point and to 
every nation that the final settlement must affect, 
our enemies as well as our friends. 4 

You catch, with me, the voices of humanity that 
are in the air. They grow daily more audible, more 
articulate, more persuasive, and they come from 
the hearts of men everywhere. They insist that the 

79 



WAR ADDRESSES OF WOODROW WILSON 

war shall not end in vindictive action of any kind ; 
that no nation or people shall be robbed or punished 
because the irresponsible rulers of a single country have 
themselves done deep and abominable wrong. It 
is this thought that has been expressed in the for- 
mula, "No annexations, no contributions, no punitive 
indemnities." 5 

Just because this crude formula expresses the 
instinctive judgment as to the right of plain men every- 
where it has been made diligent use of by the masters 
of German intrigue to lead the people of Russia 
astray, 6 and the people of every other country their 
agents could reach, in order that a premature peace 
might be brought about before autocracy has been 
taught its final and convincing lesson and the people 
of the world put in control of their own destinies. 

But the fact that a wrong use has been made of a 
just idea is no reason why a right use should not be 
made of it. It ought to be brought under the 
patronage of its real friends. Let it be said again 
that autocracy must first be shown the utter futility 
of its claims to power or leadership in the modern 
world. It is impossible to apply any standard of 
justice so long as such forces are unchecked and un- 
defeated as the present masters of Germany com- 
mand. Not until that has been done can right be set 
up as arbiter and peacemaker among the nations. 
But when that has been done — as, God willing, it 
assuredly will be — we shall at last be free to do 
an unprecedented thing, and this is the time to avow 
our purpose to do it. We shall be free to base 
peace on generosity and justice, 7 to the exclusion 
80 



NO PEACE WITH AUTOCRACY 

of all selfish claims to advantage even on the part 
of the victors. 

Let there be no misunderstanding. Our present 
and immediate task is to win the war, and nothing 
shall turn us aside from it until it is accomplished. 
Every power and resource we possess, whether of 
men, of money, or of materials, is being devoted and 
will continue to be devoted to that purpose until it 
is achieved. Those who desire to bring peace about 
before that purpose is achieved I counsel to carry 
their advice elsewhere. We will not entertain it. 

We shall regard the war as won only when the 
German people say to us, through properly accred- 
ited representatives, that they are ready to agree 
to a settlement based upon justice and the reparation 
of the wrongs their rulers have done. They have 
done a wrong to Belgium, which must be repaired. 
They have established a power over other lands and 
peoples than their own — over the great empire of 
Austria-Hungary, over hitherto free Balkan states, 
over Turkey, and within Asia — which must be 
relinquished. 8 

Germany's success by skill, by industry, by knowl- 
edge, by enterprise, we did not grudge or oppose, but 
admired rather. She had built up for herself a real 
empire of trade and influence, secured by the peace 
of the world. We were content to abide the rivalries 
of manufacture, science, and commerce that were 
involved for us in her success and stand or fall as 
we had or did not have the brains and the initiative 
to surpass her. But at the moment when she had 
conspicuously won her triumphs of peace she threw 

Si 



WAR ADDRESSES OF WOODROW WILSON 

them away to establish in their stead what the world 
will no longer permit to be established, military 
and political domination by arms, by which to oust 
where she could not excel the rivals she most 
feared and hated. 

The peace we make must remedy that wrong. It 
must deliver the once fair lands and happy peoples of 
Belgium and northern ' France from the Prussian 
conquest and the Prussian menace, but it must also 
deliver the peoples of Austria-Hungary, the peoples 
of the Balkans, and the peoples of Turkey, alike in 
Europe and in Asia, from the impudent and alien 
domination of the Prussian military and commercial 
autocracy. 9 

We owe it, however, to ourselves to say that we do 
not wish in any way to impair or to rearrange the 
Austro-Hungarian Empire. It is no affair of ours 
what they do with their own life, either industrially or 
politically. We do not purpose nor desire to dictate 
to them in any way. We only desire to see that their 
affairs are left in their own hands, in all matters, 
great or small. We shall hope to secure for the peoples 
of the Balkan peninsula and for the people of the 
Turkish Empire the right and opportunity to make 
their own lives safe, their own fortunes secure against 
oppression or injustice and from the dictation of 
foreign courts or parties, and our attitude and pur- 
pose with regard to Germany herself are of a like kind. 

We intend no wrong against the German Empire, no 
interference with her internal affairs. 10 We should 
deem either the one or the other absolutely un- 
justifiable, absolutely contrary to the principles we 
82 



NO PEACE WITH AUTOCRACY 

have professed to live by and to hold most sacred 
throughout our life as a nation. 

The people of Germany are being told by the 
men whom they now permit to deceive them and to 
act as their masters that they are fighting for the very 
life and existence of their empire, a war of desperate 
self-defense against deliberate aggression. Nothing 
could be more grossly or wantonly false, and we 
must seek by the utmost openness and candor as to 
our real aims to convince them of its falseness. We 
are in fact fighting for their emancipation from fear, 
along with our own, from the fear as well as from the 
fact of unjust attack by neighbors or rivals or schemers 
after world empire. No one is threatening the exist- 
ence or the independence or the peaceful enterprise 
of the German Empire. 

The worst that can happen to the detriment of the 
German people is this, that if they should still, after 
the war is over, continue to be obliged to live under 
ambitious and intriguing masters interested to disturb 
the peace of the world, men or classes of men whom 
the other peoples of the world could not trust, it 
might be impossible to admit them to the partnership 
of nations which must henceforth guarantee the 
world's peace. That partnership must be a partnership 
of peoples, not a mere partnership of governments. 11 

It might be impossible, also, in such untoward 
circumstances, to admit Germany to the free economic 
intercourse 12 which must inevitably spring out of the 
other partnerships of a real peace. But there would 
be no aggression in that; and such a situation, in- 
evitable because of distrust, would in the very nature 

83 



WAR ADDRESSES OF WOODROW WILSON 

of things sooner or later cure itself, by processes which 
would assuredly set in. 

The wrongs, the very deep wrongs, committed in 
this war will have to be righted. That of course. 
But they cannot and must not be righted by the 
commission of similar wrongs against Germany and 
her allies. The world will not permit the commission 
of similar wrongs as a means of reparation and settle- 
ment. Statesmen must by this time have learned 
that the opinion of the world is everywhere wide 
awake and fully comprehends the issues involved. 
No representative of any self-governed nation will 
dare disregard it by attempting any such covenants of 
selfishness and compromise as were entered into at the 
Congress of Vienna. 13 

The thought of the plain people here and everywhere 
throughout the world, the people who enjoy no privilege 
and have very simple and unsophisticated standards of 
right and wrong, is the air all governments must hence- 
forth breathe if they would live. It is in the full dis- 
closing light of that thought that all policies must be 
conceived and executed in this midday hour of the 
world's life. 

German rulers have been able to upset the peace 
of the world only because the German people were 
not suffered under their tutelage to share the comrade- 
ship of the other peoples of the world either in thought 
or in purpose. They were allowed to have no opinion 
of their own which might be set up as a rule of conduct 
for those who exercised authority over them. But the 
congress that concludes this war will feel the full 
strength of the tides that run now in the hearts and 
84 



NO PEACE WITH AUTOCRACY 

consciences of free men everywhere. Its conclusions 
will run with those tides. 

All these things have been true from the very 
beginning of this stupendous war ; and I cannot 
help thinking that if they had been made plain at the 
very outset the sympathy and enthusiasm of the 
Russian people might have been once for all enlisted 
on the side of the Allies, suspicion and distrust 
swept away, and a real and lasting union of purpose 
effected. 14 Had they believed these things at the 
very moment of their revolution and had they been 
confirmed in that belief since, the sad reverses which 
have recently marked the progress of their affairs 
toward an ordered and stable government of free men 
might have been avoided. 

The Russian people have been poisoned by the very 
same falsehoods that have kept the German people in 
the dark, and the poison has been administered by the 
very same hands. The only possible antidote is the 
truth. It cannot be uttered too plainly or too often. 

From every point of view, therefore, it has seemed 
to be my duty to speak these declarations of purpose, 
to add these specific interpretations to what I took 
the liberty of saying to the Senate in January. Our 
entrance into the war has not altered our attitude 
toward the settlement that must come when it is 
over. When. I said in January that the nations of 
the world were entitled not only to free pathways upon 
the sea but also to assured and unmolested access to 
those pathways I was thinking, and I am thinking 
now, not of the smaller and weaker nations alone, 
which need our countenance and support, but also 

85 



WAR ADDRESSES OF WOODROW WILSON 

of the great and powerful nations, and of our present 
enemies as well as our present associates in the war. 
I was thinking, and am thinking now, of Austria 
herself, among the rest, as well as of Serbia and of 
Poland. Justice and equality of rights can be had 
only at a great price. We are seeking permanent, 
not temporary, foundations for the peace of the world, 
and must seek them candidly and fearlessly. As 
always, the right will prove to be the expedient. 

What shall we do, then, to push this great war of 
freedom and justice to its righteous conclusion ? We 
must clear away with a thorough hand all impediments 
to success, and we must make every adjustment of 
law that will facilitate the full and free use of our 
whole capacity and force as a fighting unit. 

One very embarrassing obstacle that stands in 
our way is that we are at war with Germany, but 
not with her allies. / therefore very earnestly recom- 
mend that the Congress immediately declare the United 
States in a state of war with Austria-Hungary } h Does 
it seem strange to you that this should be the con- 
clusion of the argument I have just addressed to you ? 
It is not. It is in fact the inevitable logic of what 
I have said. Austria-Hungary is for the time being 
not her own mistress, but simply the vassal 16 of the 
German Government. We must face the facts as they 
are and act upon them without sentiment in this 
stern business. 

The Government of Austria-Hungary is not acting 

upon its own initiative or in response to the wishes 

and feelings of its own peoples, but as the instrument 

of another nation. We must meet its force with our 

86 



NO PEACE WITH AUTOCRACY 

own and regard the Central Powers as but one. The 
war can be successfully conducted in no other way. 
The same logic would lead also to a declaration of 
war against Turkey and Bulgaria. They also are the 
tools of Germany. But they are mere tools and do not 
yet stand in the direct path of our necessary action. 17 
We shall go wherever the necessities of this war 
carry us, but it seems to me that we should go only 
where immediate and practical considerations lead 
us and not heed any others. 

The financial and military measures which must 
be adopted will suggest themselves as the war and its 
undertakings develop, but I will take the liberty of 
proposing to you certain other acts of legislation 
which seem to me to be needed for the support of the 
war and for the release of our whole force and energy. 

It will be necessary to extend in certain particulars 
the legislation of the last session with regard to 
alien enemies ; and also necessary, I believe, to create 
a very definite and particular control over the en- 
trance and departure of all persons into and from the 
United States. 

Legislation should be enacted defining as a criminal 
offense every willful violation of the Presidential 
proclamations relating to enemy aliens promulgated 
under Section 4067 of the Revised Statutes and pro- 
viding appropriate punishment 18 ; and women as well 
as men should be included under the terms of the 
acts placing restraints upon alien enemies. It is 
likely that as time goes on many alien enemies will be 
willing to be fed and housed at the expense of the 
Government in the detention camps, and it would be 

87 



WAR ADDRESSES OF WOODROW WILSON 

the purpose of the legislation I have suggested to 
confine offenders among them in penitentiaries and 
other similar institutions where they could be made 
to work as other criminals do. 

Recent experience has convinced me that the Con- 
gress must go further in authorizing the Government 
to set limits to prices. The law of supply and demand, 
I am sorry to say, has been replaced by the law of 
unrestrained selfishness. While we have eliminated 
profiteering in several branches of industry it still 
runs impudently rampant in others. 19 The farmers, 
for example, complain with a great deal of justice 
that, while the regulation of food prices restricts 
their incomes, no restraints are placed upon the 
prices of most of the things they must themselves pur- 
chase ; and similar inequities obtain on all sides. 

It is imperatively necessary that the consideration 
of the full use of the water power of the country and 
also the consideration of the systematic and yet 
economical development of such of the natural re- 
sources of the country as are still under the control of 
the Federal Government should be resumed and 
affirmatively and constructively dealt with at the 
earliest possible moment. The pressing need of 
such legislation is daily becoming more obvious. 

The legislation proposed at the last session with 
regard to regulated combinations among our exporters, 
in order to provide for our foreign trade a more 
effective organization and method of cooperation, 
ought by all means to be completed at this session. 

And I beg that the members of the House of 
Representatives will permit me to express the opinion 
88 



NO PEACE WITH AUTOCRACY 

that it will be impossible to deal in any way but a 
very wasteful and extravagant fashion with the enor- 
mous appropriations of the public moneys which must 
continue to be made, if the war is to be properly 
sustained, unless the House will consent to return to 
its former practice of initiating and preparing all 
appropriation bills through a single committee, in 
order that responsibility may be centered, expenditures 
standardized and made uniform, and waste and 
duplication as much as possible avoided. 20 

Additional legislation may also become necessary 
before the present Congress adjourns in order to 
effect the most efficient coordination and operation 
of the railway and other transportation systems of 
the country ; 21 but to that I shall, if circumstances 
should demand, call the attention of Congress upon 
another occasion. 

If I have overlooked anything that ought to be 
done for the more effective conduct of the war, your 
own counsels will supply the omission. What I am 
perfectly clear about is that in the present session 
of the Congress our whole attention and energy 
should be concentrated on the vigorous and rapid 
and successful prosecution of the great task of winning 
the war. 

We can do this with all the greater zeal and enthu- 
siasm because we know that for us this is a war of high 
principle, debased by no selfish ambition of conquest 
or spoliation ; because we know, and all the world 
knows, that we have been forced into it to save the 
very institutions we live under from corruption and 
destruction. The purposes of the Central Powers 

89 



WAR ADDRESSES OF WOODROW WILSON 

strike straight at the very heart of everything we 
believe in; their methods of warfare outrage every 
principle of humanity and of knightly honor ; their 
intrigue has corrupted the very thought and spirit of 
many of our people ; their sinister and secret diplo- 
macy has sought to take our very territory away 
from us and disrupt the union of the states. Our 
safety would be at an end, our honor forever sullied 
and brought into contempt, were we to permit their 
triumph. They are striking at the very existence of 
democracy and liberty. 22 

It is because it is for us a war of high, disinterested 
purpose, in which all the free people of the world are 
banded together for the vindication of right, a war for the 
preservation of our nation and of all that it has held 
dear of principle and of purpose, that we feel ourselves 
doubly constrained to propose for its outcome only that 
which is righteous and of irreproachable intention, for 
our foes as well as for our friends. 

The cause being just and holy, the settlement must 
be of like motive and quality. For this we can fight, 
but for nothing less noble or less worthy of our 
traditions. For this cause we entered the war and 
for this cause will we battle until the last gun 
is fired. 

I have spoken plainly because this seems to me the 
time when it is most necessary to speak plainly, in 
order that all the world may know that even in the 
heat and ardor of the struggle and when our whole 
thought is of carrying the war through to its end we 
have not forgotten any ideal or principle for which the 
name of America has been held in honor among the 
90 



NO PEACE WITH AUTOCRACY 

nations and for which it has been our glory to contend 
in the great generations that went before us. 

A supreme moment of history has come. The eyes 
of the people have been opened and they see. The 
hand of God is laid upon the nations. He will show 
them favor, I devoutly believe, only if they rise to 
the clear heights of His own justice and mercy. 



9i 



THE PROGRAM OF PEACE 

Address to Congress, January 8, 191 8 

Gentlemen of the Congress : 

Once more, as repeatedly 'before, the spokesmen 
of the Central Empires have indicated their desire to 
discuss the objects of the war and the possible basis 
of a general peace. Parleys have been in progress 
at Brest-Litovsk between Russian representatives 
and representatives of the Central Powers to which 
the attention of all the belligerents has been invited 
for the purpose of ascertaining whether it may be 
possible to extend these parleys into a general con- 
ference with regard to terms of peace and settlement. 
The Russian representatives presented not only a 
perfectly definite statement of the principles upon 
which they would be willing to conclude peace, but 
also an equally definite program of the concrete 
application of those principles. The representatives 
of the Central Powers, on their part, presented an 
outline of settlement which, if much less definite, 
seemed susceptible of liberal interpretation until 
their specific program of practical terms was added. 

That program proposed no concessions at all, either 
to the sovereignty of Russia, or to the preferences 
of the population with whose fortunes it dealt, but 
92 



THE PROGRAM OF PEACE 

meant, in a word, that the Central Empires were to 
keep every foot of territory their armed forces had 
occupied — every province, every city, every point 
of vantage — as a permanent addition to their 
territories and their power. 1 It is a reasonable con- 
jecture that the general principles of settlement which 
they at first suggested originated with the more 
liberal statesmen of Germany and Austria, the men 
who had begun to feel the force of their own people's 
thought and purpose, while the concrete terms of 
actual settlement came from the military leaders, 
who have no thought but to keep what they have got. 
The negotiations have been broken off. The Russian 
representatives were sincere and in earnest. They 
cannot entertain such proposals of conquest and 
domination. 

The whole incident is full of significance. It is 
also full of perplexity. With whom are the Russian 
representatives dealing? For whom are the repre- 
sentatives of the Central Empires speaking? Are 
they speaking for the majorities of their respective 
parliaments, or for the minority parties, that military 
and imperialistic minority which has so far dominated 
their whole policy and controlled the affairs of Turkey 
and of the Balkan states, which have felt obliged to 
become their associates in this war? The Russian 
representatives have insisted, very justly, very wisely, 
and in the true spirit of modern democracy that the 
conferences they have been holding with the Teutonic 
and Turkish statesmen should be held within open, 
not closed, doors, and all the world has been audience, 
as was desired. To whom have we been listening, 

93 



WAR ADDRESSES OF WOODROW WILSON 

then ? To those who speak the spirit and intention of 
the resolutions of the German Reichstag 2 of the 19th 
of July last, the spirit and intention of the liberal 
leaders and parties of Germany, or to those who resist 
and defy that spirit and intention and insist upon con- 
quest and subjugations? Or are we listening, in 
fact, to both, unreconciled and in open and hopeless 
contradiction? These are very serious and pregnant 
questions. Upon the answer to them depends the 
peace of the world. 

But whatever the results of the parleys at Brest- 
Litovsk, whatever the confusions of counsel and of 
purpose in the utterances of the spokesmen of the 
Central Empires, they have again attempted to ac- 
quaint the world with their objects in the war and 
have again challenged their adversaries to say what 
their objects are and what sort of settlement they 
would deem just and satisfactory. There is no good 
reason why that challenge should not be responded to, 
and responded to with the utmost candor. We did 
not wait for it. Not once, but again and again we 
have laid our whole thought and purpose before the 
world, not in general terms only, but each time with 
sufficient definition to make it clear what sort of 
definite terms of settlement must necessarily spring 
out of them. 

Within the last week, Mr. Lloyd George 3 has spoken 
with admirable candor and in admirable spirit for 
the people and Government of Great Britain. There 
is no confusion of counsel among the adversaries of 
the Central Powers, no uncertainty of principle, no 
vagueness of detail. The only secrecy of counsel, 
94 



THE PROGRAM OF PEACE 

the only lack of fearless frankness, the only failure 
to make definite statements of the objects of the war, 
lies with Germany and her allies. The issues of life 
and death hang upon these definitions. No statesman 
who has the least conception of his responsibility 
ought for a moment to permit himself to continue this 
tragical and appalling outpouring of blood and treasure 
unless he is sure beyond a peradventure that the 
objects of the vital sacrifice are part and parcel of the 
very life of society and that the people for whom he 
speaks think them right and imperative, as he does. 

There is, moreover, a voice calling for these defini- 
tions of principle and of purpose which is, it seems to 
me, more thrilling and more compelling than any 
of the many moving voices with which the troubled 
air of the world is filled. It is the voice of the Russian 
people. 4 They are prostrate and all but helpless, it 
would seem, before the grim power of Germany, 
which has hitherto known no relenting and no pity. 
Their power, apparently, is shattered, and yet their 
soul is not subservient. They will not yield either 
in principle or in action. Their conviction of what is 
right, of what it is humane and honorable for them to 
accept, has been stated with a frankness, a largeness 
of view, a generosity of spirit, and a universal human 
sympathy which must challenge the admiration of 
every friend of mankind, and they have refused to 
compound their ideals or desert others that they them- 
selves may be safe. They call to us to say what it is 
that we desire, in what, if in anything, our purpose 
and our spirit differ from theirs, and I believe that 
the people of the United States would wish me to 

95 



WAR ADDRESSES OF WOODROW WILSON 

respond with utter simplicity and frankness. Whether 
their present leaders believe it or not, it is our heart- 
felt desire and hope that some way may be opened 
whereby we may be privileged to assist the people 
of Russia to attain their utmost hope of liberty and 
ordered peace. 

It will be our wish and purpose that the processes 
of peace, when they are begun, shall be absolutely 
open, and that they shall involve and permit hence- 
forth no secret understandings of any kind. The day 
of conquest and aggrandizement is gone by; so is 
also the day of secret covenants entered into in the 
interest of particular governments, and likely at some 
unlooked-for moment to upset the peace of the world. 
It is this happy fact, now clear to the view of every 
public man whose thoughts do not still linger in an 
age that is dead and gone, which makes it possible 
for every nation whose purposes are consistent with 
justice and the peace of the world to avow now or at 
any other time the objects it has in view. We entered 
this war because violations of right had occurred 
which touched us to the quick and made the life of 
our own people impossible unless they were corrected 
and the world secured once for all against their re- 
currence. What we demand in this war, therefore, 
is nothing peculiar to ourselves. It is that the world 
be made fit and safe to live in ; and particularly that 
it be made safe for every peace-loving nation, which, 
like our own, wishes to live its own life, determine its 
own institutions, and be assured of justice and fair 
dealing by the other peoples of the world as against 
force and selfish aggression. All the peoples of the 

9 6 



THE PROGRAM OF PEACE 

world are in effect partners in this interest, and for 
our own part we see very clearly that unless justice 
be done to others it will not be done to us. 

The program of the world's peace, therefore, is 
our program, and that program, the only possible 
program, as we see it, is this : 

1. Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, 
after which there shall be no private international 
understandings of any kind, but diplomacy shall 
proceed always frankly and in the public view. 

2. Absolute freedom of navigation upon the seas, 
outside territorial waters, alike in peace and in war, 
except as the seas may be closed in whole or in part 
by international action for the enforcement of inter- 
national covenants. 

3. The removal, so far as possible, of all economic 
barriers and the establishment of an equality of trade 
conditions among all the nations consenting to the 
peace and associating themselves for its maintenance. 

4. Adequate guarantees given and taken that 
national armaments will be reduced to the lowest 
point consistent with domestic safety. 

5. A free, open minded, and absolutely impartial 
adjustment of all colonial claims, based upon a strict 
observance of the principle that in determining all 
such questions of sovereignty the interests of the 
populations concerned must have equal weight with 
the equitable claims of the government whose title 
is to be determined. 

6. The evacuation of all Russian territory and such 
a settlement of all questions affecting Russia, as will 
secure the best and freest cooperation of the other 

97 



WAR ADDRESSES OF WOODROW WILSON 

nations of the world in obtaining for her an un- 
hampered and unembarrassed opportunity for the 
independent determination of her own political 
development and national policy, and assure her of a 
sincere welcome into the society of free nations under 
institutions of her own choosing ; and, more than 
a welcome, assistance also of every kind that she 
may need and may herself desire. The treatment 
accorded Russia by her sister nations in the months 
to come will be the acid test of their good will, of 
their comprehension of her needs as distinguished 
from their own interests, and of their intelligent and 
unselfish sympathy. 

7. Belgium, the whole world will agree, must be 
evacuated and restored, without any attempt to limit 
the sovereignty which she enjoys in common with 
all other free nations. 5 No other single act will serve 
as this will serve to restore confidence among the 
nations in the laws which they have themselves set 
and determined for the government of their relations 
with one another. Without this healing act the whole 
structure and validity of international law is forever 
impaired. 

8. All French territory should be freed and the in- 
vaded portions restored, and the wrong done to France 
by Prussia in 1871 in the matter of Alsace-Lorraine, 
which has unsettled the peace of the world for nearly 
fifty years, should be righted, in order that peace may 
once more be made secure in the interest of all. 

9. A readjustment of the frontiers of Italy should 
be effected along clearly recognizable lines of 
nationality. 

98 



THE PROGRAM OF PEACE 

10. The peoples of Austria-Hungary, whose place 
among the nations we wish to see safeguarded and 
assured, should be accorded the freest opportunity of 
autonomous development. 

ii. Rumania, Serbia, and Montenegro should be 
evacuated, occupied territories restored, Serbia 
accorded free and secure access to the sea, and the 
relations of the several Balkan states to one another 
determined by friendly counsel along historically 
established lines of allegiance and nationality, and 
international guaranties of the political and economic 
independence and territorial integrity of the several 
Balkan states should be entered into. 

12. The Turkish portions of the present Ottoman 
Empire should be assured a secure sovereignty, but 
the other nationalities which are now under Turkish 
rule should be assured an undoubted security of 
life and an absolutely unmolested opportunity of 
autonomous development, and the Dardanelles should 
be permanently opened as a free passage to the ships 
and commerce of all nations under international 
guaranties. 

13. An independent Polish state should be erected, 
which should include the territories inhabited by in- 
disputably Polish populations, which should be assured 
a free and secure access to the sea, and whose political 
and economic independence and territorial integrity 
should be guaranteed by international covenant. 

14. A general association of nations must be formed 
under specific covenants for the purpose of affording 
mutual guaranties of political independence and 
territorial integrity to great and small states alike. 

99 



WAR ADDRESSES OF WOODROW WILSON 

In regard to these essential rectifications of wrong 
and assertions of right, we feel ourselves to be intimate 
partners of all the Governments and peoples associated 
together against the imperialists. We cannot be 
separated in interest or divided in purpose. We stand 
together until the end. 

For such arrangements and covenants we are willing 
to fight and to continue to fight until they are achieved, 
but only because we wish the right to prevail, and 
desire a just and stable peace, such as can be secured 
only by removing the chief provocations to war, which 
this program does remove. We have no jealousy of 
German greatness, and there is nothing in this pro- 
gram that impairs it. We grudge her no achievement 
or distinction of learning or of specific enterprise, 
such as have made her record very bright and very 
enviable. We do not wish to injure her, or to block 
in any way her legitimate influence or power. We do 
not wish to fight her either with arms or with hostile 
arrangements of trade, if she is willing to associate 
herself with us and the other peace-loving nations 
of the world in covenants of justice and law and fair 
dealing. We wish her only to accept a place of 
equality among the peoples of the world — the new 
world in which we now live — instead of a place of 
mastery. 6 

Neither do we presume to suggest to her any altera- 
tion or modification of her institutions. But it is 
necessary, we must frankly say, and necessary as a 
preliminary to any intelligent dealings with her on 
our part, that we should know whom her spokesmen 
speak for when they speak to us, whether for the 
ioo 



THE PROGRAM OF PEACE 

Reichstag majority, or for the military party, and 
the men whose creed is imperial domination. 

We have spoken now, surely in terms too concrete 
to admit of any further doubt or question. An evi- 
dent principle runs through the whole program I have 
outlined. It is the principle of justice to all peoples 
and nationalities, and their right to live on equal 
terms of liberty and safety with one another, whether 
they be strong or weak. Unless this principle be 
made its foundation, no part of the structure of in- 
ternational justice can stand. The peoples of the 
United States could act upon no other principle, and 
to the vindication of this principle they are ready to 
devote their lives, their honor, and everything that 
they possess. 

The moral climax of this, the culminating and final 
war for human liberty, has come, and they are ready 
to put their own strength, their own highest purpose, 
their own integrity and devotion, to the test. 



IOI 



THE FOUR PRINCIPLES OF PEACE 

Address to Congress, Febeuary ii, 191 8 

Gentlemen of the Congress : 

On the 8th of January I had the honor of address- 
ing you on the objects of the war as our people 
conceive them. The Prime Minister of Great Britain 
had spoken in similar terms on the 5th of January. 
To these addresses the German Chancellor replied 
on the 24th and Count Czernin for Austria on 
the same day. It is gratifying to have our desire 
so promptly realized that all exchanges of view on 
this great matter should be made in the hearing of 
all the world. 

Count Czernin's reply, which is directed chiefly to 
my own address on the 8th of January, is uttered 
in a very friendly tone. He finds in my statement a 
sufficiently encouraging approach to the views of his 
own Government to justify him in believing that it 
furnishes a basis for a more detailed discussion of 
purposes by the two Governments. He is repre- 
sented to have intimated that the views he was ex- 
pressing had been communicated to me beforehand 
and that I was aware of them at the time he was 
uttering them ; but in this I am sure he was misun- 
derstood. I had received no intimation of what he 
102 



THE FOUR PRINCIPLES OF PEACE 

intended to say. There was, of course, no reason 
why he should communicate privately with me. I am 
quite content to be one of his public audience. 

Count von Hertling's reply is, I must say, very 
vague and very confusing. It is full of equivocal 
phrases and leads it is not clear where. It is certainly 
in a very different tone from that of Count Czernin 
and apparently of an opposite purpose. It confirms, I 
am sorry to say, rather than removes, the unfortunate 
impression made by what we had learned of the con- 
ferences at Brest-Litovsk. His discussion and accept- 
ance of our general principles lead him to no practical 
conclusions. He refuses to apply them to the substan- 
tive items which must constitute the body of any final 
settlement. He is jealous of international action and 
of international counsel. 

He accepts, he says, the principle of public diplo- 
macy, but he appears to insist that it be confined, 
at any rate in this case, to generalities and that the 
several particular questions of territory and sov- 
ereignty, the several questions upon whose settlement 
must depend the acceptance of peace by the twenty- 
three states now engaged in the war, must be discussed 
and settled, not in general council, but severally by the 
nations most immediately concerned by interest or 
neighborhood. He agrees that the seas should be 
free, but looks askance at any limitation to that free- 
dom by international action in the interest of the 
common order. He would without reserve be glad 
to see economic barriers removed between nation and 
nation, for that could in no way impede the ambitions 
of the military party with whom he seems constrained 

103 



WAR ADDRESSES OF WOODROW WILSON 

to keep on terms. Neither does he raise objection to 
a limitation of armaments. That matter will be 
settled of itself, he thinks, by the economic conditions 
which must follow the war. But the German colonies, 
he demands, must be returned without debate. He 
will discuss with no one but the representatives of 
Russia what disposition shall be made of the peoples 
and the lands of the Baltic provinces; with no one 
but the Government of France the " conditions" 
under which French territory shall be evacuated; 
and only with Austria what shall be done with Poland. 
In the determination of all questions affecting the 
Balkan states he defers, as I understand him, to 
Austria and Turkey; and with regard to the agree- 
ments to be entered into concerning the non-Turkish 
peoples of the present Ottoman Empire, to the Turkish 
authorities themselves. After a settlement all around, 
effected in this fashion, by individual barter and con- 
cession, he would have no objection, if I correctly 
interpret his statement, to a league of nations which 
would undertake to hold the new balance of power 
steady against external disturbance. 

It must be evident to every one who understands 
what this war has wrought in the opinion and temper 
of the world that no general peace worth the infinite 
sacrifices of these years of tragical suffering can 
possibly be arrived at in any such fashion. The 
method the German Chancellor proposes is the method 
of the Congress of Vienna. 1 We cannot and will not 
return to that. What is at stake now is the peace 
of the world. What we are striving for is a new 
international order based upon broad and universal 
104 



THE FOUR PRINCIPLES OF PEACE 

principles of right and justice, — no mere peace of 
shreds and patches. Is it possible that Count von 
Hertling does not see that, does not grasp it, is in 
fact living in his thought in a world dead and gone ? 
Has he utterly forgotten the Reichstag resolutions 
of the 19th of July or does he deliberately ignore them ? 
They spoke of the conditions of a general peace, not of 
national aggrandizement or of arrangements between 
state and state. The peace of the world depends upon 
the just settlement of each of these problems to which 
I adverted in my recent address to the Congress. I, 
of course, do not mean that the peace of the world 
depends upon the acceptance of any particular set of 
suggestions as to the way in which those problems are 
to be dealt with. I mean only that those problems 
each and all affect the whole world ; that unless they 
are dealt with in a spirit of unselfish and unbiased 
justice, with a view to the wishes, the natural con- 
victions, the racial aspirations, the security and peace 
of mind, of the peoples involved, no permanent peace 
will have been attained. They cannot be discussed 
separately or in corners. None of them constitutes 
a private or separate interest from which the opinion 
of the world may be shut out. Whatever affects 
the peace affects mankind, and nothing settled by 
military force, if settled wrong, is settled at all. It 
will presently have to be reopened. 

Is Count von Hertling not aware that he is speaking 
in the court of mankind, that all the awakened nations 
of the world now sit in judgment on what every public 
man, of whatever nation, may say on the issues of a 
conflict which has spread to every region of the world ? 

105 



WAR ADDRESSES OF WOODROW WILSON 

The Reichstag resolutions 2 of July themselves frankly 
accepted the decisions of that court. There shall be 
no annexations, no contributions, no punitive dam- 
ages. Peoples are not to be handed about from one 
sovereignty to another by an international conference 
or an understanding between rivals and antagonists. 
National aspirations must be respected ; peoples 
may now be dominated and governed only by their 
own consent. 

"Self-determination" 3 is not a mere phrase. It 
is an imperative principle of action, which statesmen 
will henceforth ignore at their peril. We. cannot have 
general peace for the asking, nor by the arrangements 
of a peace conference. It cannot be pieced together 
out of individual understandings between powerful 
states. All the parties to this war must join in the 
settlement of every issue anywhere involved in it, 
because what we are seeking is peace that we can 
all unite to guarantee and maintain, and every item 
of it must be submitted to the common judgment 
whether it be right and fair, an act of justice, rather 
than a bargain between sovereigns. 

The United States has no desire to interfere in 
European affairs or to act as arbiter in European 
territorial disputes. She would disdain to take advan- 
tage of any internal weakness or disorder to impose 
her own will upon another people. She is quite ready 
to be shown that the settlements she has suggested 
are for the best or the most enduring. They are only 
her own provisional sketch of principles, and of the 
way in which they should be applied. She entered 
this war because she was made a partner, whether 
106 



THE FOUR PRINCIPLES OF PEACE 

she would or not, in the sufferings and indignities 
inflicted by the military masters of Germany against 
the peace and security of mankind ; and the conditions 
of peace will touch her as nearly as they will touch any 
other nation to which is intrusted a leading part in the 
maintenance of civilization. She cannot see her way 
to peace until the causes of this war are removed and 
its renewal rendered as nearly as may be impossible. 

This war had its roots in the disregard of the rights 
of small nations and of nationalities which lacked the 
union and the force to make good their claim to 
determine their own allegiances and their own forms 
of political life. Covenants must now be entered 
into which will render such things impossible for the 
future ; and those covenants must be backed by the 
united force of all the nations that love justice and 
are willing to maintain it at any cost. If territorial 
settlements and the political relations of great popu- 
lations which have not the organized power to resist 
are to be determined by the contracts of the powerful 
governments which consider themselves most directly 
affected, as Count von Hertling proposes, why may 
not economic questions also? It has come about in 
the altered world in which we now find ourselves that 
justice and the rights of peoples affect the whole 
field of international dealing as much as access to raw 
materials and fair and equal conditions of trade. 

Count von Hertling wants the essential bases of 
commercial and industrial life to be safeguarded by 
common agreement and guaranty, but he cannot 
expect that to be conceded him if the other matters 
to be determined by the articles of peace are not 

107 



WAR ADDRESSES OF WOODROW WILSON 

handled in the same way as items in the final account- 
ing. He cannot ask the benefit of common agreement 
in the one field without according it in the other. I 
take it for granted that he sees that separate and self- 
ish compacts with regard to trade and the essential 
materials of manufacture would afford no founda- 
tion for peace. Neither, he may rest assured, will 
separate and selfish compacts with regard to prov- 
inces and peoples. 

Count Czernin seems to see the fundamental 
elements of peace with clear eyes and does not seek 
to obscure them. He sees that an independent 
Poland, made up of all the indisputably Polish peoples 
who lie contiguous to one another, is a matter of 
European concern and must, of course, be conceded ; 
that Belgium must be evacuated and be restored, no 
matter what sacrifices and concessions that may in- 
volve ; and that national aspirations must be satisfied, 
even within his own Empire, in the common interest 
of Europe and mankind. If he is silent about ques- 
tions which touch the interest and purpose of his 
allies more nearly than they touch those of Austria 
only, it must, of course, be because he feels constrained, 
I suppose, to defer to Germany and Turkey in the 
circumstances. Seeing and conceding, as he does, 
the essential principles involved and the necessity of 
candidly applying them, he naturally feels that Austria 
can respond to the purpose of peace as expressed by 
the United States with less embarrassment than could 
Germany. He would probably h ave gone much farther 
had it not been for the embarrassments of Austria's 
alliances and of her dependence upon Germany. 
108 



THE FOUR PRINCIPLES OF PEACE 

After all, the test of whether it is possible for either 
Government to go any further in this comparison of 
views is simple and obvious. The principles to be 
applied are these : 

First, that each part of the final settlement must 
be based upon the essential justice of that particular 
case and upon such adjustments as are most likely 
to bring a peace that will be permanent ; 

Second, that peoples and provinces are not to be 
bartered about from sovereignty to sovereignty as 
if they were mere chattels and pawns in a game, even 
the great game, now forever discredited, of the 
balance of power; but that 

T.hird, every territorial settlement involved in 
this war must be made in the interest and for the 
benefit of the populations concerned, and not as a 
part of any mere adjustment or compromise of claims 
amongst rival states ; and 

Fourth, that all well-defined national aspirations 
shall be accorded the utmost satisfaction that can be 
accorded them without introducing new or perpetuat- 
ing old elements of discord and antagonism that would 
be likely in time to break the peace of Europe and 
consequently of the world. 

A general peace erected upon such foundations can 
be discussed. 4 Until such a peace can be secured we 
have no choice but to go on. So far as we can judge, 
these principles that we regard as fundamental are 
already everywhere accepted as imperative except 
among the spokesmen of the military and annexa- 
tionist party in Germany. If they have anywhere 
else been rejected, the objectors have not been 

109 



WAR ADDRESSES OF WOODROW WILSON 

sufficiently numerous or influential to make their 
voices audible. The tragical circumstance is that 
this one party in Germany is apparently willing and 
able to send millions of men to their death to prevent 
what all the world now sees to be just. 

I would not be a true spokesman of the people of 
the United States 5 if I did not say once more that we 
entered this war upon no small occasion and that we 
can never turn back from a course chosen upon prin- 
ciple. Our resources are in part mobilized now and 
we shall not pause until they are mobilized in their 
entirety. 

Our armies are rapidly going to the righting front, 
and will go more and more rapidly. Our whole 
strength will be put into this war of emancipation — 
emancipation from the threat and attempted mastery 
of selfish groups of autocratic rulers — whatever the 
difficulties and present partial delays. We are in- 
domitable in our power of independent action and can 
in no circumstances consent to live in a world governed 
by intrigue and force. We believe that our own desire 
for a new international order under which reason and 
justice and the common interests of mankind shall 
prevail is the desire of enlightened men everywhere. 
Without that new order the world will be without 
peace and human life will lack tolerable conditions 
of existence and development. Having set our 
hand to the task of achieving it, we shall not turn 
back. 

I hope that it is not necessary for me to add that 
no word of what I have said is intended as a threat. 
That is not the temper of our people. I have spoken 
no 



THE FOUR PRINCIPLES OF PEACE 

thus only that the whole world may know the true 
spirit of America — that men everywhere may know 
that our passion for justice and for self-government 
is no mere passion of words but a passion which, once 
set in action, must be satisfied. The power of the 
United States is a menace to no nation or people. 
It will never be used in aggression or for the 
aggrandizement of any selfish interest of our own. 6 
It springs out of freedom and is for the service 
of freedom. 



in 



NOTES 

PERMANENT PEACE (Pages 3-12) 

On December 12, 1916, the German Government offered to meet 
the Entente Allies in a conference to discuss peace. It was generally 
felt that the proposal was made in the spirit of a victor to the van- 
quished, and the Allies rejected the offer as a " sham proposal." On 
December 18, President Wilson sent an identic note to all the bel- 
ligerent powers, asking them to state their terms for ending the war 
and guaranteeing the world against its renewal. The Entente Allies 
alone replied. A month later, on January 22, 1917, President Wilson 
addressed the Senate in the remarkable speech we are considering, 
wherein he declared the conditions on which the United States would 
give " its formal and solemn adherence to a league of peace." 

1. All treaties must receive the approval of the Senate before they 
become effective. 

2. This was spoken, of course, before the United States entered 
the war. 

3. In these words President Wilson shows himself to be in accord 
with the chief ideals of the League to Enforce Peace. 

This league was organized in Independence Hall, Philadelphia — 
the very spot where the United States of America was born — on 
June 17, 1915. Ex-President William Howard Taft was made the 
first president of the League. The League at its first meeting adopted 
the four following proposals : 

We believe it to be desirable for the United States to join a league of 
nations binding the signatories to the following : 

First: All justiciable questions arising between the signatory powers, 
not settled by negotiation, shall, subject to the limitations of treaties, be 
submitted to a judicial tribunal for hearing and judgment, both upon the 
merits and upon any issue as to its jurisdiction of the question. 

"3 



NOTES 

Second: All other questions arising between the signatories and 
not settled by negotiation shall be submitted to a council of conciliation 
for hearing, consideration, and recommendation. 

Third : The signatory powers shall jointly use forthwith both their 
economic and military forces against any one of their number that goes 
to war, or commits acts of hostility, against another of the signato- 
ries before any question arising shall be submitted as provided in the 
foregoing. 

Fourth: Conferences between the signatory powers shall be held 
from time to time to formulate and codify rules of international law, 
which, unless some signatory shall signify its dissent within a stated 
period, shall thereafter govern in the decisions of the judicial tribunal 
mentioned in Article One. 

4. According to the theory of the " balance of power," no country 
or group of countries must be allowed to become so strong as to menace 
the rights of other countries. This principle was in full force during 
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. 

5. President Wilson was severely criticized both in Great Britain 
and in America for the use of this phrase. Do you think he would 
speak or write these words now? 

6. Look up the history of Poland, Alsace-Lorraine, and other 
countries for examples of people who have been handed about "from 
sovereignty to sovereignty." Note the very forceful and effective 
manner in which President Wilson makes his thought clear. 

7. Russia, for example, since the time of Peter the Great, has been 
seeking "windows to the west." Serbia and Hungary have been 
seriously handicapped by difficulty of access to the sea. Can you 
think of other countries similarly handicapped? 

8. The United States was the only great power not involved in the 
war, and many of the lesser nations of Europe, such as Sweden and 
Norway, which were nominally neutral, were so involved as to be 
unable to speak freely. 

9. Again and again in his speeches, President Wilson makes it 
clear that he is speaking for the people of the United States, that he 
is their mouthpiece. Does the head of an autocracy speak thus? 

10. Re-read the Introduction to see how the military alliances of 
Europe before 19 14 were a very potent cause of the war. President 
Wilson has the faculty of seeing what is the vital issue of the hour, 
and of so stating this that the people are forced to face it squarely. 

11. Especially at the First and Second Hague Peace Conferences 
in 1899 and 1907. 

114 



NOTES 



DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS BROKEN (Pages 13-18) 

Indignant at the refusal of the Entente to consider her peace 
proposals of December 16, and ignoring President Wilson's efforts 
to secure a discussion of peace terms, Germany issued a proclamation 
on January 31, 191 7, enlarging the war zone and removing all re- 
strictions on her submarine warfare. The zone then outlined en- 
tirely surrounded the British Isles, the Atlantic coast of France and 
Belgium, and included large areas in the Mediterranean Sea. Said 
this note, "All ships met within that zone will be sunk." This 
breach of the Sussex pledge of May 4, 19 16, President Wilson met 
by breaking off diplomatic relations with Germany, on February 3, 
191 7. At 2 p. m., on the same day, the President appeared before the 
assembled Congressmen in the hall of the House of Representatives, 
and read the words of this carefully prepared address. The address 
recites in detail the negotiations which led to the giving of the Sussex 
pledge. 

1. The Sussex was a French passenger steamer on its way across 
the English Channel, from Folkestone, England, to Dieppe, France. 
It was not armed and was not following the route of the military 
transports. It was torpedoed without warning. About eighty pas- 
sengers, including American citizens, were killed or wounded. 

2. Many people have severely criticized President Wilson for not 
taking this firm stand much earlier. This was almost a year after 
the sinking of the Lusitania, and many other unarmed passenger 
ships had been sunk in the meantime. 

3. This is the so-called Sussex pledge. 

4. According to the usages of international intercourse, failure 
to reply to this diplomatic note leaves it as the accepted interpreta- 
tion of the previous note of the German Government. 

5. This refers to the efforts by Great Britain and France to estab- 
lish a blockade and prevent supplies of any kind from reaching the 
Central Powers, and to the determination expressed by the Entente 
Powers of restoring Alsace-Lorraine to France, freeing the subject 
peoples of Austria-Hungary, etc. 

6. This passage is eminently characteristic of President Wilson. 
He is very slow to believe that a person or a nation that he has long 
believed to be an honorable friend is in reality a base traitor. 



"5 



NOTES 

ARMED NEUTRALITY (Pages 19-25) 

During the month of February the German submarines sank about 
two hundred ships, of which fifty-one were neutrals. It was obviously 
sheer folly to send unarmed American vessels to meet such risks. 
On February 26, therefore, President Wilson again addressed Congress, 
asking for the power to arm American merchant vessels. The meas- 
ure passed the House of Representatives by the decisive vote of 403 
to 13, but a dozen Senators, taking advantage of the rules of the 
Senate which allowed unlimited debate, refused to permit a vote on 
the bill before the expiration of Congress at noon on March 4th. 

1. The William P. Frye, carrying a cargo of wheat consigned to 
an English firm, was sunk January 28, 1915, by a German raider, 
Prim Eitel Friedrich. After considerable correspondence the Ger- 
man Government, November 29, 1915, agreed to pay damages for 
the destruction of ship and cargo, and to safeguard the crews before 
sinking other vessels. 

2. President Wilson is constantly referring to himself as the 
servant of the people. Is this the spirit of democracy? 

3. Note the skill with which President Wilson focuses attention on 
the main point at issue. 

4. The closing paragraphs help to raise this address above the 
level of an ordinary state paper. President Wilson is not satisfied 
merely to state the facts and ask for the authority he desires. He 
makes use of the occasion to enforce some of the great ethical prin- 
ciples involved. The address is valuable as showing the growth in 
the President himself which the war has produced. The President 
exhausted every honorable means for avoiding war. A careful 
study of the address will reveal something of the gropings of his own 
mind, searching for solid ground on which to rest. From a literary 
viewpoint the address possesses little value ; from a historical view- 
point it is invaluable. People and President to a large degree moved 
at the same pace. A study of the development of President Wilson 
in this crisis is also a study of the development of the American 
people. 

SECOND INAUGURAL ADDRESS (Pages 26-31) 

President Wilson began his second term at noon Sunday, March 4, 
191 7. The inaugural exercises were held on the following day, at 
which time this address was delivered. 
Il6 



NOTES 

1. The record to which Mr. Wilson here refers is the record for new 
legislation affecting the social and industrial life of the nation, such as 
the Federal Reserve Banking Law, the Farm Loan Banking Law, 
the Income Tax Law, and numerous others. The pupils might well 
make a list of the important new legislation in these four years, 1913- 
1917. See yearbooks, current histories, and magazine summaries. 
The Independent, the Outlook, the Review of Reviews, the Literary 
Digest are all good for this purpose. 

2. Look up the difference in meaning between composite and 
cosmopolitan. 

3. Notice how often in these addresses President Wilson repeats 
this thought. 

4. Here the President is half prophet. The American people were 
not consciously "citizens of the world" on March 4, 191 7. The vast 
majority of them were still inclined to abide by the earlier policy of 
our Government of avoiding entangling alliances with European 
Powers. The logic of events, the common suffering of the war, will 
make us eventually "citizens of the world." 

5. These seven principles are worthy of careful consideration. 
Do they tally with the President's declarations of policy in his later 
addresses ? 

6. Again the President is urging his oneness with the people of 
America. What is the source of the figure in this paragraph? 
Notice how vivid it makes the thought of the speaker. 

7. The oath of office as President of the United States, which is 
administered by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court before the 
Inaugural Address. 

8. Compare with Lincoln's " Gettysburg Address." 

AT WAR WITH GERMANY (Pages 32-45) 

German submarines continued to sink ships without warning. 
American citizens continued to lose their lives while pursuing their 
rightful business on the high seas. The feeling in America was stirred 
to a fever pitch by the publication of an intercepted dispatch from 
the German Foreign Minister Zimmermann to the German Minister 
in Mexico. This note suggested an offensive and defensive alliance 
between Mexico and Germany. "Together we will make war and 
together we will make peace." The note proposed that the south- 
western part of the United States should be Mexico's reward for her 
part in the war. Mexico was also to try to secure the cooperation of 

117 



NOTES 

Japan. The note was written during January, 191 7, before the 
United States had broken diplomatic relations. It was made public 
in March. At the same time evidence was secured of widespread 
plots by German spies, aided by the German Ambassador, Von 
Bernstorfl, to cripple the industries of the United States and render 
us impotent. In consequence, the 65th Congress was called in 
special session, April 2, 191 7. That evening the President appeared 
before the two Houses to deliver one of the most momentous 
messages in the history of our country, in which he asked Congress 
to recognize that the course of the German Government was 
" nothing less than war against the people and Government of the 
United States." 

1. Congress meets in regular session on the first Monday of 
December in each year. Whenever the President calls Congress 
together at any other time the session is known as an extraordinary 
session. The President cannot declare war. The Constitution gives 
that power to Congress alone. 

2. See Introduction for history of the submarine warfare. 

3. That is, the right guaranteed by international law. 

4. How many lives had been lost by submarine warfare when 
these words were spoken? See Introduction. 

5. See Introduction for George Washington's policy as outlined in 
his first inaugural. Other nations, however, have not observed this 
high standard. 

6. The German constitution gives to the Emperor and the Bundes- 
rath, a body of delegates appointed by the rulers of the various Ger- 
man states, full power to make war without consulting the repre- 
sentatives of the people. 

7. Russia had only recently overthrown the Czar. 

8. For instance, there is in the possession of the United States 
Government a check made out to Konig, head of the Hamburg- 
American secret service, and signed by Captain Franz von Papen, then 
military attache to the German embassy in Washington, fully identi- 
fied as having been used to pay for placing explosives disguised as 
coal in the bunkers of merchant vessels. Papers seized from Wolf 
von Igel, an employee of the German embassy, prove that the Ger- 
man Government, through her embassy in America, was involved in 
the destruction of lives and property, in suborning American writers 
and lecturers, in subsidizing a bureau to stir up labor troubles in 
munitions plants, and many other similar hostile activities. 

9. See above for the meaning of this note. 

Il8 



NOTES 

10. Compare President Wilson's words with those of other Ameri- 
can statesmen : 

Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute. — Charles C. 
Pinckney, Ambassador to France, 1796. 

Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price 
of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God ! I know not what 
course others may take ; but as for me, give me liberty, or give me 
death! — Patrick Henry 

Let not the miscreant host vainly imagine that we fear their 
arms. No ! these we despise ; we dread nothing but slavery. Death 
is the creation of a poltroon's brain. 'T is immortality to sacrifice 
ourselves for the salvation of our country. — John Hancock 

Every good citizen makes his country's honor his own, and cher- 
ishes it, not only as precious, but as sacred. He is willing to risk 
his life in its defense, and is conscious that he gains protection while 
he gives it. — Andrew Jackson 

Fondly do we hope — fervently do we pray — that this mighty 
scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it 
continue until all the wealth piled up by the bondman's 250 years of 
unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn 
with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was 
said 3000 years ago, so still it must be said, " The judgments of the 
Lord are true and righteous altogether." — Abraham Lincoln 

Let the pupil look for other similar expressions in the published 
speeches of our great leaders. 

THE DECLARATION OF WAR (Page 46) 

The resolution declaring a state of war with Germany and em- 
powering the President to carry on the war with all the resources of 
the nation was passed through the Senate by a vote of 82 to 6 on the 
4th of April, and was adopted by the House by a vote of 373 to 50, 
after a sixteen-hour debate, on April 6, 19 17. 

WHAT WE ARE FIGHTING FOR (Pages 47-50) 

Soon after the Russian revolution and the entrance of the United 
States into the war, it was decided to send an American mission to 
Russia to congratulate the new government and to find out in what 
way the United States could assist in providing for its needs. The 
mission was headed by Elihu Root, former Secretary of State, and 

IIQ 



NOTES 

consisted of representatives of the railroads, business, and the army 
and navy, and of the religious, industrial, and socialist organizations 
of the United States. President Wilson took advantage of the occa- 
sion to send this message to the government and people of Russia, 
explaining what the United States was fighting for. 

1. Compare these general principles with the more specific state- 
ments on pages 98 and 109. 

THE FLAG WE FOLLOW (Pages 51-60) 

This address was delivered at the Flag Day celebration in 
Washington on June 14, 191 7. 

1. Probably President Wilson already knew of the correspondence 
incriminating the German Ambassador, von Bernstorff, previously 
referred to. 

2. The German emblem of power is the eagle. 

3. Reread the Introduction to see if the facts warrant these 
statements. 

4. Greece, Rumania, Bulgaria, and Albania were all ruled by 
kings of German lineage. 

5. When these words were spoken, the broad belt from the Baltic 
to the Euphrates was actually in the possession of German armies ; 
the "Drang nach Osten" had apparently been realized. 

6. The German Government, it has been proved, had established 
a world-wide secret-service system. Her spies were everywhere. 
Count von Bernstorff, the German Ambassador, was supplied by the 
German Government with funds which were freely spent to influ- 
ence public opinion against the President's policies. Many citizens 
and even officers in the United States army were found to be 
cooperating with this propaganda. Spies were everywhere. The 
intrigue for peace was persistent. 

7. These words are prophetic. Few people took them seriously, 
but the events of the year in Russia proved the marvelous insight 
of President Wilson. The ultra-radical party, the Bolsheviki, over- 
threw the more moderate government of Kerensky, who favored the 
prosecution of the war. An armistice was signed with Germany in 
December. In March a treaty of peace was concluded which left 
Germany in full control of the destiny of Russia. 

8. Probably this address is the most powerful of all the President's 
war addresses. 

120 



NOTES 

THE PRESIDENT'S REPLY TO THE POPE (Pages 61-65) 

In accordance with an age-old custom, Pope Benedict XV addressed 
an identic note to all the belligerent Powers on August 1, 191 7, pro- 
posing a meeting to discuss peace terms. The proposal was chiefly for 
a return to the conditions before the war, with some minor adjust- 
ments of territory, and with a concert of Powers to guard against 
future wars, as the following extract shows : 

" But in order no longer to speak in general terms, as the circum- 
stances had counseled us in the past, we now wish to make more 
concrete and practical proposals and to invite the governments of 
the belligerent peoples to come to an agreement upon the following 
points, which seem to be the basis of a just and lasting peace, leaving 
to them the task of analyzing and completing them. 

" First of all, the fundamental point must be that for the material 
force of arms be substituted the moral force of right, from which shall 
arise a fair agreement by all for the simultaneous and reciprocal 
diminution of armament, according to the rules and guarantees to be 
established, in a measure necessary and sufficient for the maintenance 
of public order in each state ; then in the substitution for armies 
of the institution of arbitration with its high pacifying function, 
according to the rules to be laid down and the penalties to be imposed 
on a state which would refuse either to submit a national question to 
arbitration or to accept its decision. 

" Once the supremacy of right has been established, all obstacles 
to the means of communication of the peoples would disappear, by 
assuring, by rules to be fixed later, the true liberty and community 
of the seas, which would contribute to ending the numerous causes of 
conflict and would also open to all new sources of prosperity and 
progress. 

" As to the damages to be repaired and as to the war expenses, we 
see no other means of solving the question than by submitting as a 
general principle complete and reciprocal condonation, which would 
be justified, moreover, by the immense benefit to be derived from 
disarmament, so much so that no one will understand the con- 
tinuation of a similar carnage, solely for reasons of an economic 
order. 

" For certain cases there exist particular reasons. They would 
be deliberated upon with justice and equity. But these peaceful 
agreements, with the immense advantages to be derived from them, 
are not possible without a reciprocal restitution of the territory at 
present occupied. 

121 



NOTES 

" Consequently, on the part of Germany, there should be the com- 
plete evacuation of Belgium with the guarantee of her full political, 
military, and economic independence toward it. The evacuation 
of French territory. On the part of the other belligerents, similar 
restitution of the German colonies. 

"As regards the territorial questions, as, for example, those which 
have arisen between Italy and Austria, and between Germany and 
France, there is reason to hope that in consideration of the immense 
advantages of a durable peace with disarmament, the parties in conflict 
would wish to examine them with a conciliatory disposition, taking 
into consideration, as we have said formerly, the aspirations of the 
peoples and the special interests and the general welfare of the great 
human society. 

" The same spirit of equity and justice ought to be followed in the 
examination of other territorial questions, notably those relative to 
Armenia and the Balkan states, and the territories making a part of 
the ancient kingdom of Poland, whose noble and historical tradi- 
tions and sufferings, which it has endured, especially during the 
present war, ought to conciliate the sympathies of nations." 

1. Robert Lansing became Secretary of State after the resignation 
of William Jennings Bryan in the summer of 19 15. It is invariable 
custom that all communications between the United States Govern- 
ment and any other government are signed by the Secretary of 
State. It is well known that this Reply to the Pope, as well as many 
other of the diplomatic notes sent since the outbreak of the war in 
19 14, was actually written by President Wilson. 



THE AMERICAN PEOPLE MUST STAND TOGETHER 

(Pages 66-76) 

This address was delivered to a convention of the American Federa- 
tion of Labor, the largest and most influential organization of laborers 
in the United States. In this speech the President explains at greater 
length than on any previous occasion the war policy of the United 
States. In the latter part of the speech he addresses himself particu- 
larly to the labor situation, which was serious. There existed a crying 
need for workers to put through the big projects of the Government, 
to supply munitions and ships for the war. There were threats of 
strikes, and laborers in some sections of the country were inclined 
to be hostile to the war program. President Wilson faced the 
situation squarely, and won his audience, which passed resolutions 

122 * 



NOTES 

indicating an attitude of aggressive loyalty and zeal for the national 



1. Notice how the President appeals for the support of the labor- 
ing men from the very highest motives of self-forgetfulness. 

2. This refers to a remark of the German Emperor, made at 
Hamburg in 1901, that Germany was fighting to secure "a place in 
the sun." This phrase was speedily taken up as a slogan by the Pan- 
German League, and was used by the Crown Prince in his introduc- 
tion to " Germany in Arms " in 1913. 

3. Notice that the President answers his own questions in this and 
the following paragraph. 

4. This paragraph should be studied with a map of Europe and the 
Near East at hand. It would help to make the President's meaning 
clear if some pupil would color a map in "appropriate black" to show 
the territory in Germany's possession in November, 191 7. See Inter- 
national Year Book for 1915 and later dates, under Turkey, Com- 
munication, for further information about the Berlin-to-Bagdad 
Railroad. 

5. The Pan-German League was organized in 1890 and has been 
engaged in an active propaganda to bring all European people of 
Germanic stock under a single flag, and to see Germany take a domi- 
nant share in the history of the world. The Pan-Germans urged 
the war, and since its beginning have earnestly advocated large 
annexations. 

6. Austria-Hungary. 

7. Colonel Edward M. House of Austin, Texas, a graduate of Cor- 
nell University, has been President Wilson's special representative in 
Europe on several occasions since 1914. Colonel House, through a 
long residence in England, has a large acquaintance with influential 
Europeans. 

8. How can the "power of the American spirit" prevent slacking? 

9. Samuel Gompers, one of the founders of the American Federa- 
tion of Labor, has been its president, with one year's intermission, 
since 1882. 

10. Have you observed that this is the only anecdote in any of these 
addresses? Why would you expect it in this address rather than in 
any other? 

11. The very familiar, even colloquial, tone of the entire speech, 
and particularly of this paragraph, would, of course, be utterly out 
of place in any other of the war addresses. It should be borne in 

123 



NOTES 

mind that the speech was delivered to an audience of workingmen, 
whereas most of his other addresses were carefully written out and 
read in a formal manner. 



NO PEACE WITH AUTOCRACY (Pages 77-91) 

When Congress met for its regular session in December, 191 7, 
President Wilson, following the custom which he had re-introduced 
from Washington's day, appeared before the assembled Congress and 
delivered his annual message. It was his first appearance before 
Congress after the declaration of war in April. In the meantime 
preparations on an enormous scale were under way for our active 
participation in the war. Several hundred thousand soldiers were 
in France receiving their final training, and a million more were in 
training in our own country. The Russian revolution had developed 
rapidly into a state of anarchy. The Bolsheviki (see Introduction) 
had come into power and were on the verge of signing an armistice 
with the enemy. Many German troops were thus released on the 
Russian front and were hurled against Italy in a terrific effort to 
break down the Italian offensive. Italy was needing our help; 
a necessary preliminary thereto must be a declaration of war on 
Austria-Hungary . 

This address of the President is epochal in character. Here he 
gives us a definition of our war aims that can be emblazoned on our 
banners for all the world to read and left flying to the breeze when 
the war is won. Here he sounds a trumpet call for all Americans 
and their allies to purge themselves of ambitions for aggrandize- 
ment. In this address the President stands as the acknowledged 
leader of the forces of democracy, fighting for the overthrow of autoc- 
racy, as the great champion of liberalism, freedom, and progress. 
He has translated the dreams of the poets into the words of a prac- 
tical statesman. The message has raised the war to a higher level. 
International morality will be better and purer because of these 
brave words. 

1. At the beginning of each regular session of Congress each execu- 
tive department submits a report for the past year to the President, 
who in turn submits these reports to Congress. 

2. The President and Congress are the spokesmen of the American 
people. In what sense is this true? 

3. Compare with Reply to Pope, p. 64. 

124 



NOTES 

4. Has it been customary among nations to make "full, impartial 
justice" the basis of peace, or is President Wilson sounding a new 
note of international morality ? 

5. This formula had been adopted by the Russian revolutionists. 

6. German spies and secret envoys had been very busy in Russia 
all summer and at the time this address was made were about to 
succeed in securing an armistice with Russia. 

7. Generosity and justice are not wholly unprecedented in the 
history of the United States. For instance, the voluntary relinquish- 
ment of a considerable part of the Boxer indemnity to China was 
certainly an act of generosity. No other nation has voluntarily 
dealt with other nations in that manner. Do not all true Ameri- 
cans believe in fair play and in generous treatment toward defeated 
antagonists ? 

8. Through enormous loans to her almost bankrupt allies, Germany 
secured great power over them. German officers in the Austrian and 
Turkish armies are numerous and powerful. 

9. President Wilson is arguing for freedom for the oppressed 
peoples of Europe. Is the adjective "impudent" justified here? 

10. German newspapers have repeatedly charged that President 
Wilson was trying to force his own ideas of government upon them. 

11. See the address of January 22 and accompanying notes for 
a more detailed description of the League to Enforce Peace. 

12. That is, it might be necessary to exclude Germany from the 
same rights of trade which other nations enjoy. 

13. The Congress of Vienna met in 18 14 to readjust the European 
tangle after the downfall of Napoleon. It has long been noted for 
its cynical disregard of right and justice. Its readjustments were 
made solely on the basis of successful bargaining by the rulers of 
the states involved. The rights and wishes of peoples were utterly 
disregarded. 

14. Read again the President's message to the Russian people and 
see how much of this ideal he then expressed. 

15. Congress acceded to this request within a very few days with 
only one negative vote. 

16. What is a vassal nation ? Is it correct to call Austria-Hungary 
a vassal nation ? 

17. Why did Austria-Hungary stand in the way of direct action 
any more than did Bulgaria or Turkey ? 

18. Proclamations issued by the President on April 6 and 
November 16, 191 7, had forbidden alien enemies to possess firearms, 

125 



NOTES 

to approach within one half mile of any fort, arsenal, or navy 
yard, to publish any attack upon the Government, to ascend in any 
balloon, airplane, etc. Alien enemies were also required to register 
and report. 

19. Prices of many articles had risen enormously and in many cases 
the dealers made no pretensions of any reason for increasing the price 
other than their ability to get more. 

20. A study of the Budget System of the British Parliament would 
help the student to get the full force of President Wilson's recommen- 
dation. See Lowell, " Government in England," Chapter 14. 

21. There was serious congestion of freight on the railways, and 
some communities were almost entirely without coal and other 
necessities. 

22. This paragraph is worth re-reading. It summarizes in Presi- 
dent Wilson's concise, clear-cut manner the whole reason for this 
war. In fact, the entire peroration is in his very best style, and is 
deserving of the most careful study, for content, for diction, and for 
high moral purpose. 



THE PROGRAM OF PEACE (Pages 92-101) 

Rather unexpectedly, President Wilson appeared before a joint 
session of Congress on January 8, 19 18, and addressed it on the 
subject of peace. The Central Powers had been conducting negotia- 
tions with the Bolsheviki government in Russia for some weeks at 
Brest-Litovsk, a city which had been captured in the Austro-German 
drive in the latter part of 19 15. The address is deserving of care- 
ful study and comparison with the traditional policy of the United 
States of aloofness from European problems. The fact that the 
Central Powers desired peace has been referred to repeatedly by 
President Wilson. His reply to the Pope and his Buffalo address 
give many of the reasons why a German peace would be unsatisfac- 
tory. The addresses before us are the first official definition of 
the objects which the United States Government feels are essential 
to peace. 

1. In the parleys between the representatives of the Central Powers 
and those of the Bolsheviki government of Russia, the German repre- 
sentatives at first indicated a willingness to be reasonable, but clearer 
definitions of their position showed they expected Russia to reimburse 
German citizens for losses which they had suffered as the result of 
126 



NOTES 

laws passed by Russia, but were unwilling to pay Russian peasants for 
goods commandeered by the Germans. 

The Germans argued that all contributions exacted from occupied 
cities and territories as well as all requisitions were for supporting 
order and consequently should not be refunded. The German mem- 
bers said the Russian plan for creating an international fund to 
indemnify individuals for losses was impracticable and they also 
declared that submarine, Zeppelin, and airplane damages were not 
indemnifiable. 

2. The text of these resolutions may be found in the Review of 
Reviews, August, 191 7, p. 115. 

3. Mr. David Lloyd George, Prime Minister of Great Britain. 

4. Undoubtedly one of the purposes of this address was to encour- 
age the Russians to continue their fight for democracy. 

5. Germany, it will be recalled, has repeatedly expressed a will- 
ingness to evacuate Belgium, provided that her interests there be 
safeguarded. 

6. Does not this appeal to you as perfectly frank and fair? Does 
it not seem to you that fair-minded Germans would willingly accept 
the principles laid down by the President ? 



THE FOUR PRINCIPLES OF PEACE (Pages 102-m) 

Following the President's address to Congress on January 8th, both 
Count Czernin, the Austrian Foreign Minister, and Count von Hert- 
ling, the German Chancellor, made public addresses in response. The 
first point of President Wilson's program, that there should be "open 
covenants of peace, openly arrived at" seemed thus in a fair way to 
be realized. The address of Count Czernin might fairly be interpreted 
as a bid for peace, as the following quotations may show : 

" When peace has been concluded with Russia it will no longer be 
possible, in my opinion, to prevent for long the conclusion of a gen- 
eral peace in spite of the efforts of the Entente statesmen. 

" Although I am under no delusion and know the fruit of peace 
cannot be matured in twenty-four hours, nevertheless I am con- 
vinced that it is now maturing and that the question whether or not 
an honorable general peace can be secured is merely a question of 
resistance. 

" President Wilson's peace offer confirms me in this opinion. 
Naturally an offer of this kind cannot be regarded as a matter 

127 



NOTES 

acceptable in every detail, for that obviously would render any 
negotiations superfluous. 

" I think there is no harm in stating that I regard the recent proposal 
of President Wilson as an appreciable approach to the Austro- 
Hungarian point of view, and that to some of them Austria-Hungary 
joyfully could give her approval." 

Count Czernin leaves the case of Turkey and the questions of 
Germany's conquests in Europe and of her lost colonies to these 
countries, but makes it plain that "Austria-Hungary, faithful to her 
engagements to fight to the end in defense to her allies, will defend 
the possessions of her war allies as she would her own." But as to 
Poland, the Austrian Foreign Minister adopts almost the exact 
language of the American President : 

" We also are supporters of an independent Polish state, which 
would include all territories and populations which indisputably 
are Polish. On this point we believe we should quickly come to an 
understanding with President Wilson. 

" Finally, in his idea of a league of peoples the President probably 
will meet with no opposition in the monarchy. 

" As may be seen, then, from this comparison of my views with 
those of Mr. Wilson, we agree not only on great principles in general, 
according to which the world is to be newly regulated after the end 
of this war, but our views also approach each other on several concrete 
peace questions. 

" The remaining differences do not seem to me great enough to lead 
to the belief that a discussion at this point should not bring clearness 
and rapprochement. 

" This situation, which probably arises from the fact that Austria- 
Hungary and the United States of America are the two great Powers 
among the two groups of enemy states whose interests least conflict, 
suggests the thought that an exchange of ideas between these two 
Powers might be the starting point for conciliatory discussions be- 
tween all states which have not entered into peace conversations. 

" I trust Mr. Wilson will use the great influence he doubtless has on 
all his allies that they explain conditions on which they are willing 
to negotiate, and he will have gained the immeasurable merit of hav- 
ing called a general peace conference to life." 

The President, therefore, appeared before Congress on February 
nth, and gave utterance to the "four principles" which must be 
accepted as the foundation for peace. 
128 



NOTES 

1. This Congress has already been referred to. If the student is 
not familiar with the spirit of that Congress and with the kind of 
peace which was made in 1815, he should review these points. 

2. Three parties in the German Reichstag, the Socialists, the 
Centrists or Catholics, and the Radicals, united on July 19, 191 7, 
in adopting the peace resolutions to which President Wilson refers. 
The text of these resolutions may be found in the Review of Reviews, 
August, 19 1 7 (p. 115), and elsewhere. 

3. Meaning the right of any people to determine for themselves 
under what rule they shall live — a new phrase for the "consent of the 
governed." 

4. This is plainly opening a door for Austria to continue the 
discussion of peace terms, if she is ready to subscribe to the four 
principles. 

5. How often the President refers to himself as the spokesman of 
the American people. Do you notice any difference in this respect 
between the spirit of democracy and the spirit of autocracy? 

6. This is a proud boast which few nations can make. Compare 
the spirit of this paragraph with the utterances of German leaders 
and other American statesmen. See Introduction. 



129 



s 



W92 t 

































^ V .,*i*jj* t ^a «{k? , Deacidified using the Bookkeeper proce 

*v» & ^jfxtffiC /Hi* *&t\ & * Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 

li Treatment Date: MAY 2 001 

'•" tP ^ • PreservationTechnologfc 






A WORLD LEADER IN. PAPER PRESERVATI 

• • a\ *C& 111 Tn ™ 500 Park Drive 

4> « • \JJ! * it Cranberry Township. PA 16066 

• — '•**-L ▼ ^ I70A\ 77Q-9111 













V ***** ^ -a? 










'«• .,# 



S**^ 



rv72£», 



°^ '♦••* ^ V 



